The Energy Department sped along with plans to build an above-ground waste storage building at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) with a public meeting on the proposed structure Thursday — a legal requirement of the agency’s WIPP operating permit that moves the facility one small step toward approval.
The agency has long desired the logistical breathing space that would be provided by the new structure, with its 65,280 cubic feet of storage space. The need is now thrown into sharp relief following DOE’s decision to close WIPP’s southern end after repeated ceiling collapses in that area of the deep underground salt mine.
Closing WIPP’s southern end means sacrificing what could have roughly three rooms of waste storage space. A room, in WIPP parlance, is a storage space roughly the size of a football field.
To build the above-ground waste storage facility, DOE needs the New Mexico Environment Department to modify the WIPP operations permit held by the agency and its site prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP). The department formally applied for that permit Sept. 29, detailing its plans in a nearly 200-page application to Santa Fe uploaded to the federal agency’s WIPP website.
The above-ground storage facility would be designed to store waste that, for whatever reason, DOE and NWP cannot send underground as soon as it arrives. The agency has long desired the building so that, in a normal operating environment, there is somewhere to put incoming waste shipments during the occasional mine-maintenance shutdowns required to keep WIPP’s ever-shifting salt ceilings from caving in.
Mine maintenance periods last six to eight weeks. However, DOE wants the ability to keep some transuranic waste in the planned storage facility for up to a year, according to the Sept. 29 permit application. At an industry conference in September, Frank Marcinowski, head of regulatory and policy affairs at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said the agency wants to finish building the new above-ground storage depot by 2019.
It was not clear what the proposed above-ground storage unit would cost, or how soon DOE could start building the facility once New Mexico gives its approval. DOE spokesman Bill Taylor did not reply to a request for comment Thursday.
WIPP already has a Waste Handling Building Unit — shipments of transuranic waste were marooned there after an underground radiation leak in 2014 shut the mine down — but that facility was not designed with long-term storage in mind.
The Waste Handling Building was designed as a staging site where waste could be checked out before being disposed of underground, not for the long-term storage into which it has been kludged for three years. The building sits on 84,000 square feet, of which about 50,000 is suitable for transuranic waste storage, according to DOE’s permit application.
Among other things, the new above-ground waste storage unit would require DOE to revise a massive safety tome known as a Documented Safety Analysis: a nearly 800-page document that spells out how DOE and NWP will safely inter shipments of materials and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium in a post-accident underground.
The Energy Department has treaded cautiously lately around its plans to reopen WIPP by December or January, and to start accepting new shipments of transuranic waste from other DOE sites by April. Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office, said earlier this month in a WIPP town hall webcast that “if it takes a little bit longer, it takes a little bit longer.”
