The possibility of storing excess plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., coupled with increased oil and gas drilling in the area, mean the Energy Department needs to re-evaluate the safety of the world’s only open transuranic waste storage facility, according to Stanford University researchers.
Those factors, along with a pair of high-profile safety failures in 2014 at the facility, “really illustrate the challenge of predicting the behavior of the repository over 10,000 years," Rod Ewing, a professor in the California university’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, said in a press release.
The Stanford release hit the wire the same day Ewing and two co-authors published a longer commentary on WIPP safety in the journal Nature. The Nature piece is titled “Policy: Reassess New Mexico’s nuclear-waste repository.”
The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) opened in 1999 and was designed to safely store, for 10,000 years, laboratory equipment and other items contaminated by production of weapon-grade nuclear material at various DOE sites. The WIPP storage min is located about half a mile underground in a 250-million-year-old salt deposit some 300 miles southeast of Albuquerque. The facility mainly stores equipment contaminated by plutonium-239, plutonium-240, americium, and curium.
WIPP has been discussed as a potential repository for 34 metric tons of excess weapon-usable plutonium that could be downblended rather than converted into reactor fuel under the current federal plan. The conversion would take place at the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility now under construction at the agency’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
However, in August 2015, the final report of the Plutonium Disposition Red Team, a DOE-led group chaired by Thomas Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said diluting the 34 tons of material below weapons grade for storage at WIPP is the most affordable disposal option, given DOE’s current top line.
A DOE spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the Stanford study.
