The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico now expects to hold its next WIPP Town Hall briefing sometime in July, rather than June 20 as previously announced.
Due to personnel changes within DOE, the meeting is being rescheduled, a city of Carlsbad representative said by email Thursday.
Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico since 2015, is moving to Washington, D.C. to serve as the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s principal deputy assistant secretary starting mid-June. No announcement has been made yet about Shrader’s replacement at Carlsbad. The deputy manager there is Kirk Lachman, who has more than 27 years of experience at DOE.
The meetings, webcast on the Facebook page for the DOE transuranic waste site, are held at 5:30 p.m. Mountain Time at the Carlsbad, N.M., City Hall Annex.
Representatives from the Carlsbad Field Office and DOE’s WIPP contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, typically give updates on waste emplacement, salt mining, and various construction projects at the underground disposal site.
The Energy and Water Development funding bill passed in May by the full House Appropriations Committee calls for WIPP to receive $397 million in the 2020 fiscal year: about the same as the 2019 enacted budget, and more than the $392 million the White House sought for 2020. In line with the budget request, the bill plans $58 million for continued construction of an underground ventilation system and about $35 million for an underground exhaust shaft.
The House Appropriations bill must now win approval from the full House.
Community reuse organizations designed to promote economic development at Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup sites got good news last month when the House Appropriations Committee voted to affirm their authority to receive and resell old equipment the federal agency no longer needs.
The committee-approved $7.2 billion fiscal budget for the Office of Environmental Management makes it clear the so-called CROs can still be used as a clearinghouse for old DOE equipment – something which has been questioned among some at the nuclear cleanup office, said Rick McLeod, president and CEO of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization, which serves counties in South Carolina and Georgia which border the SRS site.
Language was inserted into the report that accompanied the Energy and Water Development Bill, which still must be voted upon by the full house, by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.). The lawmaker submitted the provision on behalf of CROs including the Hanford Site in Washington state, SRS, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio. Newhouse said the organizations use money brought in from the sales for everything from job training to business development grants.
The “asset transition program,” as DOE calls it, allows the local organizations to receive everything from old cranes to disposable clothing, McLeod said by phone last week. The CROs are then able to basically hold a “yard sale” for the old stuff.
In fiscal 2018, for example the Savannah River reuse group was able to raise $278,000 largely through the sale of several old office trailers previously used at the Energy Department site. House Appropriations passed the energy and water appropriations bill on May 21
