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. The critical path is the sequence of events in a project — such as the WIPP reopening — that the project manager believes will take the longest to complete.
According to the press release, DOE and its WIPP prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, will pay special attention to several jobs that are mandatory for the site’s reopening: fitting new bolts to shore up the underground salt mine’s shifting ceilings and walls; and the interim ventilation system that will increase mine airflow to the point where it is safe for workers to start interring transuranic waste there again; and maintenance of fire suppression systems.
The “IVS system should have been in place last August, and it’s still not operable, and it’s now gained prominence and it’s on the critical path,” John Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing in a Monday telephone interview.
The IVS was installed in April, but DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership “apparently failed to get the operating procedures in place, so they can’t get it started,” said Heaton, the nuclear point man for the Carlsbad city government.
DOE is looking for a work-around on IVS and on June 3 applied for a modification to its WIPP operating permit with the state of New Mexico to allow personnel underground to work in pockets of stagnate airflow while wearing respirators.
Heaton, fresh from a visit to Washington, D.C. last week, threw the blame for the delays squarely on Nuclear Waste Partnership.
“Everyone’s very concerned about the competency of the contractor,” Heaton said. “There’s something significantly wrong with the leadership, that they can’t accomplish these goals.”
WIPP was slated to reopen pn Dec. 12, according to the WIPP Integrated Baseline DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership released in February. That 15-month schedule included just over two months of margin, and DOE has burned “a considerable amount” of it, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE Carlsbad Field Office, said in Friday’s press release.
In May, Nuclear Waste Partnership and DOE completed a crucial collection of new safety procedures known as a documented safety analysis two months later than expected. The DSA was a major choke point for the rest of the WIPP reopening project, with crucial restart activities prohibited from beginning until DOE formally accepted the document.
