LAS VEGAS — The Energy Department wants to build an above-ground waste-storage facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Calrsbad, N.M., and expects to submit an application to state regulators in the coming weeks, the agency’s top nuclear-waste-cleanup-policy regulator said here Wednesday.
“I would expect the permit mod would probably be submitted in the next few weeks here,” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said in a brief interview following his keynote address here at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit.
When the permit modification arrives in Santa Fe, the New Mexico Environment Department must consider it “in a timely manner,” according to the terms of the roughly $70 million settlement the state reached with DOE in January over the 2014 accidents that closed the nation’s only permanent disposal facility for the contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
The New Mexico Environment Department could not immediately be reached for comment by deadline Wednesday.
DOE aims to complete the above-ground waste storage facility by 2019, Marcinowski said in his keynote address. The planned facility will be larger than the site’s existing 84,000 square-foot Waste Handling Building: a processing facility for mine-bound waste kludged into use as a storage depot after WIPP shut down in 2014, Marcinowski told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
“I think they’re designing it for like six or eight weeks of storage,” Marcinowski said. “It’s short-term storage so that we don’t have to interrupt transportation to the site when there is a maintenance outage.”
Some buildup of waste shipments at WIPP is inevitable. As much a mine as it is a waste disposal facility, WIPP requires periodic maintenance by diesel-burning equipment. Given the mine’s severely constrained underground airflow, it is not possible to safely simultaneously perform mine maintenance while also interring radioactive waste.
Underground airflow dropped off severely at WIPP after the 2014 underground fire and accidental, unrelated radiation release from an improperly packaged container of transuranic waste blew open in the mine’s panel 7 disposal area and shut down the facility.
An interim ventilation system that came online at WIPP last month — it was originally scheduled to be ready in April, but some of its hardware had to be remanufactured due to poor workmanship, and other hardware was damaged during shipment to the mine — will boost underground airflow to over 110,000 cubic feet a minute from the current 60,000 cubic feet per minute.
A supplemental ventilation system expected to come online by June 30 of next year would boost underground airflow to about 180,000 cubic feet a minute. It would not be until a new permanent ventilation system comes online sometime in the next decade that DOE would be able to perform mine maintenance during waste emplacement operations. The permanent upgrade is expected to ring in at $270 million to $400 million.
