Transuranic Waste

Carlsbad, N.M., is open for nuclear business, John Heaton said proudly last week. There are a few irons in the fire — the city is all in favor of the consolidated interim nuclear waste-storage facility Holtec International wants to build outside town — but Carlsbad’s crown jewel is, of course, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation […]

Workers at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., checked off a major milestone Thursday, when they finished almost three months of practicing the stricter new waste-disposal procedures they will follow when the nation’s only transuranic waste-disposal facility reopens. Taken together with a company spokesman’s Thursday statement that WIPP prime Nuclear […]

Workers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) transuranic waste-disposal facility near Carlsbad, N.M., are slated to wind down waste-disposal dress rehearsals Wednesday, having needed almost a month longer than expected to complete the critical exercise, a spokesman for the Energy Department’s prime contractor at the site said Monday. This is the second delay for cold operations, as […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership, prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, got a clean audit of its internal review of costs incurred in fiscal years 2013 and 2014 for operating the nation’s only permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste, the Energy Department Inspector General’s Office said in a report released Friday. Nuclear Waste […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) wants a heads-up before the Energy Department transfers a problematic batch of transuranic waste from a commercial storage facility in Texas to a DOE defense nuclear site such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Moreover, according to a letter dated July 29 from DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery to […]

The Energy Department is creeping closer to implementing new safeguards that will allow the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Area G transuranic waste processing facility to resume full operations and continue treatment of the problematic waste stream that caused a radiation leak at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) two years ago. According to […]

Already months behind schedule, dress rehearsal waste-disposal operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., have been extended another two weeks due to unspecified equipment issues, an executive with the mine’s prime contractor said in a Thursday town hall meeting. Workers at the Department fo Energy transuanric wase storage site on June 1 […]

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) wants a heads-up before the Energy Department transfers a problematic batch of transuranic waste from a commercial storage facility in Texas to a DOE defense nuclear site such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.  Moreover, according to a Friday letter from DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery to Energy Secretary […]

The Energy Department is creeping closer to implementing new safeguards that will allow the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Area G transuranic waste processing facility to resume full operations and continue treatment of the problematic waste stream that caused a radiation leak at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) two years ago. According to […]

The Energy Department is preparing for a scenario in which some portion of the transuranic waste now stored above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. remains above ground until next summer — six months after the mine’s scheduled, and now-imperiled, December reopening. That is according to a modification granted last […]

A presentation about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) dropped at the last minute from the agenda of a Wednesday citizens meeting in Santa Fe, N.M., includes no mention that the underground transuranic waste facility will reopen in December, as the Energy Department has publicly pledged since February. According to the WIPP recovery presentation that was to be briefed Thursday to the Northern […]

The Energy Department is preparing for a scenario in which some portion of the transuranic waste now stored above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. remains above ground until next summer — six months after the mine’s scheduled, and now-imperiled, December reopening. That is according to a modification granted last month by the New Mexico […]

The Energy Department has acknowledged that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) may not be ready to reopen on Dec. 12 as planned, and the agency is now working to figure out exactly which activities are holding up the restart of operations at the nation’s only disposal site for the radio-contaminated material and equipment known as […]

The Energy Department acknowledged Friday the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) may not be ready to reopen Dec. 12, as scheduled. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz ordered the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office late last week “to reevaluate the critical path schedule for reopening WIPP,” according to an agency press release that hit the wire late Friday. […]

With the details of the work sought essentially unchanged from the draft solicitation issued in May, the Energy Department on Thursday released a final solicitation for a five-year contract to transport transuranic waste over the road to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The final request for proposals for a WIPP Transportation Services contract […]

Thursday passed without any word from the Department of Energy or its contractor on whether a major milestone in the resumption of transuranic waste storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Calrsbad, N.M., happened as scheduled. According to the the 12-month WIPP Integrated Baseline developed by DOE and WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), workers […]

Dr. Abraham Van Luik, a senior physical scientist at the Energy Department who since 2010 led the Carlsbad Field Office’s International Repository Science Program, died July 9 in the remote town of Faywood, N.M., according to obituary notices posted online and a DOE spokesperson. Van Luik, who was born in the Netherlands and worked for […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) needs to provide more visible escape paths from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and improve the reliability of water supply for its fire suppression system, according to a report issued Friday by the Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments. “In most cases, NWP has effectively established and implemented fire protection […]

The Energy Department and its contractors are discussing amongst themselves different approaches to a series of safety procedures for treating the problematic stream of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that caused the 2014 radiation leak at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. According to a June 10 […]

Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) needs to provide more visible escape paths from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and improve the reliability of water supply for its fire suppression system, according to a report issued Friday by the Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments. “In most cases, NWP has effectively established and implemented fire protection […]

If the Department of Energy holds to a date released in February, this Thursday would mark a major milestone toward the resumption of transuranic waste storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. Thursday is the date — according to the the 12-month WIPP Integrated Baseline developed by DOE and WIPP prime Nuclear Waste […]

As the Energy Department mulls how much of its legacy transuranic waste will have to be repackaged under the stricter new Waste Acceptance Criteria that went into effect at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) this week, the agency is quietly buying itself more time to deal with the problematic waste that caused the plant’s […]

The final request for proposals for a contract to haul radio-contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., will be released this month, no sooner than Sunday, the Energy Department said. The new WIPP Transportation Services contract will be a five-year, fixed-price, indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery deal. The pact will replace a pair […]

The final request for proposals for a contract to haul radio-contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., will be released this month, no sooner than Sunday, the Energy Department said. The new WIPP Transportation Services contract will be a five-year, fixed-price, indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery deal. The pact will replace a pair […]

Some transuranic waste that has already been packed up and prepared for shipment to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) might have to be unpacked, inspected, and packed up again, according to new waste acceptance criteria slated to go into effect today at the underground mine near Carlsbad, N.M. The announcement came […]

The Energy Department this week put in place just over $15 million in funding to support administrative tasks within various state governments necessary to resume shipments of radio-contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The move, announced in a pair of press releases, represents a small but necessary bit of groundwork that greases the […]

The Department of Energy has finished its annual assessment of the Richland Operations Office’s program for characterizing transuranic waste bound from the Hanford Site in Washington state for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office wrote in a letter to Monday to a New Mexico official. The Carlsbad […]

The New Mexico Environment Department on Thursday joined the Energy Department and one of its contractors as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in May by the advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico. The group’s lawsuit alleges the federal agency owes the state millions of dollars after it blew a 2015 deadline to clean up a large cache of Cold […]

Waste Control Specialists said this week the legacy nuclear waste it is baby-sitting for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — including some from the problematic batch that leaked radiation into the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) — should remain in Texas for two years longer than the company’s current license allows. […]

Despite a few hiccups, workers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., are generally adhering well to stricter maintenance procedures and requirements established after the 2014 accidents that have kept the nation’s only transuranic waste-disposal facility closed for more than two years, according to a report the Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise […]