Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
11/13/2015
Above-Ground Storage Facility Could Operate Even After WIPP Reopens
The Energy Department has implemented 70 percent of corrective actions recommended by DOE’s Accident Investigation Board for recovery of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, DOE Office of Environmental Management Carlsbad Field Office spokesman Tim Runyon said during a presentation in Washington this week. The AIB issued 241 judgments of need for the field office that oversees the New Mexico transuranic waste repository and WIPP management and operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. These included restoring WIPP nuclear safety programs. Runyon said the corrective actions won’t be validated until DOE conducts an operational readiness review.
“I think everybody out there really wants to look forward and not look back; certainly not that we’ll forget,” he said Wednesday during the winter meeting of the American Nuclear Society in Washington, D.C. “Any of the issues that we had to deal with are wide open. We are trying to look forward.”
WIPP has not accepted new shipments of waste since a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. Meanwhile, waste is piling up at other DOE sites.
Runyon added that he believes DOE plans to use the same amount of space to emplace waste as before the radiological release, including Panel 7, where the release occurred and which remains contaminated. “There’s no reason to walk away from those; because it’s an expensive commodity,” he said. “It’s expensive to maintain those areas, and they’re available.”
Contaminated areas can theoretically hold waste as well as uncontaminated areas, Runyon said, yet DOE has not discovered how to move waste from a clean area to a contaminated area without bringing cross-contamination back to the clean areas.
“I think that’s going to be one of the challenges, but I think they’ve been successful at getting the contamination levels low enough that they can be done, and I think they’ll come up with a method to do that this winter,” Runyon added.
As DOE and NWP ramp up toward WIPP reopening, expected by the end of 2016, the two organizations plan to construct an on-site above-ground storage facility that would likely be required to go through DOE’s critical decision process, he said. WIPP already has some above-ground storage capacity, but the proposed concept would involve adding substantially to the available space. Plans are still budding, and Runyon said officials are hammering out the details of when the facility would be constructed, how big it would be, how much waste it could store, and how much it would cost. All DOE projects at or over $10 million are required to undergo the critical decision process.
While reiterating that above-ground plans are nowhere near finalized, Runyon said such a facility may end up operating even after WIPP’s full recovery, because of the value it could provide in smoothing out movement of waste.
“If shipments are not coming in, you’re able to maximize waste handling and that sort of thing, so that the work is smooth in terms of always having work on site, always having material to move to the underground,” he said. “Shipments could stop for some things like weather, for example. It’s so there’s always waste there to be disposed of, or moved to the underground and emplaced.”
