A trucking industry safety group will continue to train transportation safety officials to inspect shipments of radioactive waste headed to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., under a $1.7 million, five-year cooperative agreement the Energy Department announced late Tuesday.
The Greenbelt, Md.-based Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance will “coordinate and implement activities to train Motor Vehicle Safety Officials and ensure the safe transportation of transuranic waste between generator sites and to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP),” according to a DOE press release. “This includes general management of the plan, inspector training, inspection program data for quality validation, and insure its overall relationship to highway safety.”
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has helped train transportation officials about radioactive waste shipments to WIPP since 1997, DOE said.
WIPP, the nation’s only permanent disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, has been closed since February 2014, following an accidental underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire.
The underground salt mine is slated to reopen in December or January, and to begin accepting new waste shipments from across the DOE nuclear complex by April, DOE has said.
