Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
1/8/2016
The new comprehensive recovery plan for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant now being finalized says with 80 percent confidence that the transuranic waste storage site will reopen for business in late 2016, a senior Department of Energy official said on Thursday.
The underground facility near Carlsbad, N.M., has been closed to waste shipments since a vehicle fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. DOE scrapped a prior performance measurement baseline, which projected reopening WIPP in March of this year at a cost of $242 million, due to issues including faulty equipment and safety-related activities during recovery operations.
Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), the managing contractor at WIPP, submitted the revised document in December, said Todd Shrader, manager at the department’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO). “We are finalizing the review, we lost a little bit of time over the holidays with some of the shutdowns, but we are getting very close to approving it,” he said during a WIPP town hall meeting in Carlsbad.
Department officials up to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz have consistently asserted in recent months that WIPP would resume waste emplacement operations by the end of this year. Nuclear waste accumulating at other DOE sites cannot be shipped to WIPP until that happens. The 80 percent confidence level is “based on how you do project management and your risk analysis and mitigation measures, how they’re applied to the system,” Shrader said.
“2016 will be the year that we resume waste emplacement at WIPP,” said Jim Blankenhorn, recovery manager and deputy project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership. Neither he nor Shrader discussed the PMB’s cost estimate for the recovery and restart; $82 million of the site’s fiscal 2016 budget of $305 million is designated for recovery operations.
WIPP is also preparing to move formally from recovery to restart activities, Blankenhorn said.
Recovery started in mid-2014 following a four-month “response” period immediately after the accidents that involved measures including installing new alarms and various cleanup projects, he said. That gave way to the recovery phase, which was about “redoing the programs and procedures, the training and qualification of our staff, obtaining new equipment, and finishing up corrective actions. We’ve come a long way to that; we’re not quite ready to declare that we’re complete with recovery, but we’re probably within a month of being able to declare that we are done with recovery and we’re going to move into the final phase.”
Blankenhorn cited a number of examples of progress in the recovery phase, including installing more than 5,500 bolts since November 2014 to help stabilize the underground; rolling back radiological risk in 65 percent of the underground, with at least another 30 percent anticipated in the next 45 days; and CBFO and NWP carrying out 191 of 241 corrective actions listed in DOE Accident Investigation Board reports on the response to the 2014 incidents, with most of the rest to be finished in the next 90 days. He acknowledged hiccups in the process as well, several involving the production, shipping, and installation of an interim ventilation system that will provide the additional air flow needed for waste emplacement to resume underground. In December, NRP halted installation of ductwork for the system after the subcontractor experienced several safety incidents; installation resumed on Tuesday and is due to be completed by the end of February, Blankenhorn said.
Readiness activities under the restart phase will require a period of months, he said. WIPP will begin with eight weeks of cold operations, allowing employees to practice procedures including the receipt and emplacement of simulated waste packages and to conduct drills for accidents such as a fire or air-monitor alarm. A management team will oversee each day’s work to assess and provide feedback on what they see. “Basically this just gives our operators time to take eight weeks to practice, to get comfortable with the procedure sets, to make sure that the procedures work, make sure the equipment works, and make sure all our questions have been address in terms of the new safety basis documents and any changes that we’ve made,” according to Blankenhorn.
The cold operations period will be followed by on-site review by a team of 20-25 subject matter experts who will observe WIPP workers doing similar work for two weeks, and then provide a “report card” on areas such as site procedures, programs, and equipment readiness, Blankenhorn said. WIPP will take about 30 days to address any corrective actions that are recommended. Nuclear Waste Partnership will then make a declaration of readiness allowing it to move to the next phase of restart: two separate operational readiness reviews by teams of DOE contractors and department personnel from across the complex. Those two-week assessments will also involve monitoring of drills and simulated waste operations, along with checking the equipment and corrective actions made over the last two years. Both reviews are likely to provide findings that need to be addressed, leading to another period of weeks for making changes and training after each, according to Blankenhorn.
Following all those steps, NWP would request DOE authorization to resume waste emplacement.
