The city of Carlsbad, N.M.’s, main nuclear-waste liaison said Monday he expects little trouble from a partial ceiling collapse at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which the Energy Department maintains will still reopen as scheduled in December or January.
“Any back collapse is a concern, but it’s not an area where people are working,” John Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, said in a telephone interview. “As soon as WIPP is open and they’re emplacing waste, they’ll go back and stabilize the ceiling.”
DOE late Monday confirmed in a statement posted to its website what the local Carlsbad Current-Argus newspaper reported Saturday: a portion of WIPP’s ceiling had collapsed near the sealed-up Panel 4 disposal area. Panel 4, in WIPP’s southern end, was sealed off in 2010 after being filled up with transuranic waste from across the DOE complex. Nobody was hurt by the rockfall, which was discovered Sept. 27, DOE stated.
In the same statement, DOE confirmed WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) on Monday began a crucial contractor operational readiness review that is among the last remaining prerequisites for reopening WIPP. The review, a stringent, self-administered test of whether NWP is ready to resume waste disposal at the site using the strict, post-accident safety protocols the contractor published earlier this year, has to be completed and approved by the department before the mine can reopen. DOE and NWP officials in September said they wanted to start the readiness review the week of Sept. 26. The evaluation was once scheduled to begin in June but slid to the right after NWP took longer than expected to get its new WIPP safety rules approved.
WIPP’s salt ceiling and walls naturally shift and must be periodically reinforced. Partial collapses such as the one discovered last week happen periodically. Heaton said another occurred earlier this year in the mine’s exhaust drift, which is north of the waste disposal panels where the latest rock fall was discovered. Another partial cave-in happened in January 2015 near Panel 3: another sealed-up waste disposal cell.
Panels 3 and 4 are nearby, but not adjacent, to Panel 7: the storage area where a drum of improperly packaged waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory blew open in 2014, leaking radiation into the mine’s southern corridor and forcing DOE to suspend waste shipments to WIPP.
