A major underground ventilation project key to the future of the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is almost two-thirds of the way finished, a manager for the prime contractor told a virtual “town hall” meeting Thursday.
The Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System is 63% percent complete, Nuclear Waste Partnership president and project manager Sean Dunagan said. The timeline for the operation of the system has slipped three years to 2026 and the cost has about doubled to nearly $500 million, according to a Government Accountability Office report earlier this year.
Dunagan said the Amentum-led WIPP prime is pleased with progress made by the current ventilation construction contractor, The Industrial Co., a Kiewit subsidiary. The new sub was brought in after the Nuclear Waste Partnership fired the initial sub in August 2020.
The ventilation project should increase underground airflow at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to about 540,000 cubic feet per minute, up from the current level of 180,000 cubic feet per minute.
In addition, WIPP should finish disposing of waste in Panel 7 by early September, Dunagan said. Panel 7 was contaminated as a result of a February 2014 radiation leak that forced WIPP offline for about three years. The next section, Panel 8, is not contaminated and so won’t require workers to wear elaborate layers of personal protective gear, the WIPP Dunagan said.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is considering a half-dozen potential sites for long-term storage of elemental mercury, including its earlier choice of Waste Control Specialists in Texas, the agency said Friday.
The DOE will accept public comment between now and Aug. 22 on a second draft supplemental environmental impact statement on long-term storage. In addition to Waste Control Specialists (WCS), the other candidate sites are: the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada; Bethlehem Apparatus in Pennsylvania; Perma-Fix Diversified Scientific Services in Tennessee; Veolia North America in Arkansas or one of the Clean Harbors facilities in Illinois, Tennessee and Utah.
The agency said in a Friday Federal Register notice it plans to hold two online public hearings on the draft via Zoom on Aug. 2 and Aug. 4.
The DOE has studied potential long-term homes for elemental mercury since 2011 under the Mercury Export Ban of 2008. In March, DOE officially withdrew its designation of WCS for the site, as required by the 2020 settlement of a lawsuit brought by gold mining companies. The gold interests challenged both the method used to select WCS and the level of fees DOE would charge for storage. In May and through June 1 the DOE accepted proposals from contractors interested in providing the storage service.
Halfway through the fiscal year, the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site appeared on pace to dispose of more radioactive and classified waste than during fiscal 2021, according to the latest quarterly report from the site.
During the second quarter of the fiscal year, which ended March 31, the site disposed of 154,000 cubic feet of waste, which amounts to nearly 330,000 cubic feet since the fiscal year started on Oct. 1, 2021, according to the second quarter report.
DOE had posted no third quarter report as of Wednesday morning. The Nevada site disposed of 539,000 cubic feet during fiscal 2021, according to DOE data.
Most of the waste, about 234,000 cubic feet in fiscal 2022 so far, was low-level radioactive waste. A small slice, about 7,000 cubic feet of waste arriving at Nevada this fiscal year for disposal, was classified as non-radioactive or classified non-radioactive hazardous, according to the data. Before the pandemic, the site would typically receive in the neighborhood of 1 million cubic feet per year, Nevada DOE officials have said.
