It was not clear this week whether Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership began a scheduled operational readiness review that is a critical choke point for reopening the nation’s only disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material known as transuranic waste.
Bill Taylor and Tim Runyon, spokesmen for the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office, did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week. Donavan Mager, a spokesman for Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), also did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
At a recent industry conference, DOE’s top Carlsbad manager hinted that NWP might need longer than expected to finish correcting shortcomings discovered after the contractor finished 12 weeks of practicing its strict new waste-disposal protocols in August.
In an NWP-led management self-assessment of those exercises the contractor discovered five areas — some related to paperwork, others technical — where the contractor did not follow its new waste-disposal procedures exactly as prescribed.
That has consequences for the operational readiness review, insofar as “we will not enter that [review] unless we have all the prerequisites completed from the management self-assessment,” Todd Shrader, Carlsbad Field Office manager, said in a Sept. 15 panel discussion at the DOE’s National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
The operational readiness review is a more stringent test of whether Nuclear Waste Partnership is ready to resume waste disposal operations at the WIPP, about 25 miles east of Carlsbad. The review is slated to take about one month to complete, according a WIPP restart schedule DOE and NWP released in February. DOE would follow up with an agency-led operational readiness review. Only once the agency review is complete will DOE authorize NWP to resume waste disposal at WIPP.
WIPP is slated to reopen in December or January, and to begin accepting new waste shipments from across the DOE complex by April, according to public timetables DOE and contractor officials have shared.
January would be about a month later than the December reopening date the agency and its contractor have been shooting for since February. December is itself about six months later than the March 2016 restart date the agency and its industry partner announced in 2015.
WIPP has been closed since an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in 2014.
