CAST Specialty Transportation will haul transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant over the next five years under a potentially $112 million contract announced by the Energy Department Thursday.
Under the deal, an indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery contract using firm fixed-price task orders, CAST “will provide facilities, personnel, and equipment to operate a local terminal within the Greater Carlsbad, New Mexico (within 10 miles) area and transportation and maintenance services necessary to support WIPP and shipments of transuranic (TRU) waste,” DOE wrote in a press release announcing the deal.
CAST, Henderson, Colo., was one of two companies DOE put under contract in 2012 to haul the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). CAST’s last contract ran out in January, but the other carrier, Visionary Solutions of Oak Ridge, Tenn., will stay on the job through July 27, according to DOE’s website.
CAST and Visionary Solutions did not immediately reply to requests for comment late Thursday.
Following the 2014 accidents that closed the mine for three years, DOE scaled back the work under both the waste-transportation contracts it awarded in 2012. Now that the mine has reopened, DOE is accepting far fewer waste shipments each week than it was before the closure.
That made it impossible, the agency said, to justify the cost of keeping two carriers under contract.
DOE is now sending three shipments a week to WIPP, Susan Cange, the agency’s acting assistant administrator for environmental management, said in congressional testimony last week.
According to the most current public data available on DOE’s official online WIPP-waste database, WIPP received 12 waste shipments in the five weeks from April 7 to May 22: good for a delivery rate of about 2.5 a week. However, DOE does not confirm deliveries on the online database until two weeks after the delivered waste has been buried underground at WIPP.
