The Energy Department thinks it can check off critical steps toward permanently shuttering the south end of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) by year’s end, the the nuclear point man for the city of Carlsbad, N.M., said Tuesday.
After repeated ceiling collapses this year and last at the southern end of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), DOE announced last week it would close that area of the mine for good. The process will take four to five weeks and requires regulatory approval from both the New Mexico Environment Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A critical first step to closure includes installing an underground ceiling support system known as cribbing to prevent cracks in WIPP’s naturally shifting salt ceiling from creeping into the still-needed north end of the facility from the mine’s disused southern end. A second task: relocating an electrical substation that services soon-to-be-abandoned southerly areas.
“By the end of the year they will have suspended operations in the south end of the mine and they will move the substation,” John Heaton, president of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, said Tuesday in a phone interview.
Heaton and the rest of the task force met yesterday in Carlsbad with officials from DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), the agency’s prime contractor for the WIPP.
NWP workers discovered three ceiling collapses between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4. All three happened in sections of WIPP where waste disposal areas have long been filled up and sealed off, and where workers are not permitted. The department has not performed routine mine maintenance in these areas since the 2014 underground radiation release that contaminated some of the WIPP’s southerly reaches and prompted the agency to suspend waste disposal operations site-wide.
