Jeffrey Carswell has been promoted to deputy manager of the Energy Department’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico, putting an end to talk that one of the leading figures in the agency’s years-long drive to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was headed up the road to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Carswell — one of the managers whose signature was required for DOE to clear WIPP’s Dec. 23 reopening — has been the senior technical safety manager at the Carlsbad Field Office since February 2015. He replaces acting deputy manager Sean Dunagan, who held the No. 2 spot for about a year, DOE wrote in a Dec. 30 press release.
Carswell most recently helped WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) secure DOE approval for the massive new documented safety analysis that established strict new safety and operating procedures to prevent repeats of the February 2014 underground radiation leak and equipment fire that closed the site for nearly three years.
Those accidents never would have happened had the new WIPP safety rules been in place in 2014, and they are “not going to happen again,” Carswell told state and local officials — and a national audience watching online — during a June town hall meeting in Carlsbad.
Carswell, a nuclear Navy veteran and current reservist, is a veteran DOE hand who has also worked for agency contractors. He previously spent some 15 years at the Savannah River Site’s H Canyon facility. Earlier this year, rumors swirled that Carswell would leave Carlsbad for the Los Alamos National Laboratory some 300 miles north by road in New Mexico. A new position in the senior executive service evidently persuaded the longtime nuclear manager to stay put at WIPP.
WIPP is the nation’s only permanent storage facility for the radioactively contaminated material known and equipment known as transuranic waste. Such waste is piled high at Cold War-cleanup sites across the DOE complex, but none will be sent to WIPP until after NWP finishes burying waste marooned above ground at the mine after the 2014 accidents.
DOE and NWP could complete that work as soon as May, a source said this week.
