Since reopening to shipments in April 2017, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 133 transports of transuranic waste as of Dec. 21, the last date for which data is publicly available.
The Idaho National Laboratory made nearly two-thirds, or 88, of the shipments. Under a 1995 settlement agreement with Idaho, DOE committed to taking all of its transuranic waste out of the state by Dec. 31, 2018.
Texas-based Waste Control Specialists was a very distant second at 18 shipments of waste that originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee recorded 17 shipments. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina moved nine shipments to WIPP and the Los Alamos National Laboratory made one shipment.
After being offline for nearly three years following a February 2014 underground fire and radiological release, WIPP resumed operations in December 2016 and started receiving shipments of TRU waste again on April 7 of last year.
Most of the 2017 shipments, 95 of them, were received since Aug. 1, according to WIPP data.
Nuclear Waste Partnership President and Project Manager Bruce Covert said during a WIPP Town Hall meeting in September that the site is expected to receive about 258 shipments between August 2017 and August 2018.
AECOM-led NWP is the WIPP management contractor.
