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 the exercise is officially known, since they began in June, and closes with DOE’s drive to reopen WIPP by Dec. 12 nearly four months behind the schedule the agency and its contractor released in February. The December date was itself a more than six-month slip to the right, compared with the March 2016 restart the agency and its contractor envisioned as late as 2015.
“[M]anagement made the decision to extend Cold Ops evolutions for about a week to give employees more time to practice waste processing using their procedures, and to ensure all equipment is operating as designed,” Nuclear Waste Partnership spokesman Donavan Mager said by email Monday.
Cold operations, which do not involve work with actual nuclear material, are a major prerequisite for reopening WIPP, which is required for resuming shipments of radio-contaminated material and equipment from across the DOE complex to the New Mexico disposal facility. WIPP has been closed since 2014, following an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated, underground fire.
In July, DOE acknowledged it will be challenged to make the December date. The delay in starting cold operations stemmed from difficulties securing agency approval for the expansive new set of contractor-authored safety procedures that will govern waste-disposal operations at WIPP after the reopening, a DOE official said in a June 2 WIPP townhall in Carlsbad.
These safety procedures, codified in the nearly 800-page Documented Safety Analysis approved in May, are the script Nuclear Waste Partnership is following during the ongoing cold operations. Cold ops were supposed to wrap up in late July after eight weeks but were pushed back to Aug. 15 due to issues with the people carriers used in the underground, then delayed again to Aug. 24.
Editor’s Note, 8/24/2016, 11:04 a.m.: The story has been corrected to clarify that it was DOE, not its contractor, that said cold operations were delayed because the agency did not approve new waste-disposal safety procedures as soon as expected.
