The Energy Department’s National TRU Program convenes a two-day meeting tomorrow in Carlsbad, N.M., with major decisions looming regarding restarting transuranic waste shipments to the nearby Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
The meeting will take place at DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, some 40 miles west by road from WIPP: the country’s only permanent deep-underground disposal site for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
WIPP reopened in December, and DOE prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) began putting waste in the mine less than two weeks afterward, beginning with material that was marooned above ground at the site after the 2014 underground radiation leak and underground fire that closed the mine for nearly three years.
Clearing out the backlog already at WIPP, at a rate of two waste burials a week, is expected to take until March or so, Phil Breidenbach, NWP’s president and project manager, said last month during the site’s grand reopening.
After that, it is not clear which sites will ship their transuranic waste to WIPP first. DOE has not publicly discussed the WIPP shipping queue, leaving even officials in states that house the agency’s transuranic waste inventory in the dark.
Some details have made it into the sunlight. The Idaho National Laboratory has the DOE complex’s biggest cache of transuranic waste: some 22,000 metric tons of the contact-handled variety, or about enough to fill up 200, 53-foot trailers. Idaho officials believe the site is at or near the top of the queue to ship to WIPP. At the other end of the line, the Hanford Site in Washington state, with much of its transuranic waste inventory yet to be processed, will be last to ship.
One pressing problem DOE could address this week is an expiring contract with Waste Control Specialists for storage of roughly 100 containers of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts now housed at the company’s complex near Andrews, Texas. This is the same type of waste that caused the 2014 radiation leak at WIPP.
Waste Control Specialists stores this waste — byproducts of Cold War weapons programs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. — under a contract awarded in 2014 by NWP and which including options is worth $25.4 million. The deal runs through March.
Asked whether the storage contract had yet been extended beyond March, a Waste Control Specialists spokesperson on Monday declined to comment.
