Twenty-six containers of transuranic waste shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for disposal years ago might not be buried there until 2018, the Energy Department disclosed Friday in a regulatory filing.
Hundreds of containers of transuranic waste — radioactively contaminated material and equipment produced by Cold War nuclear weapons programs — were marooned above ground at WIPP outside Carlsbad, N.M., in February 2014 after an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire at the deep-underground salt mine. The facility reopened last December.
The New Mexico Environment Department, primary state regulator for WIPP, gave DOE until June 30, 2017, to bury waste that arrived before the accidents. Most of the stranded waste, hundreds of containers by DOE’s count, have already been emplaced underground.
On Friday, however, the federal agency told Santa Fe there were 26 containers in the mine’s above-ground Waste Handling Building that could not be cleared for burial by the end-of-June deadline. DOE asked New Mexico for permission to keep that waste above ground for up to another year, until June 30, 2018.
In Friday’s filing, DOE and WIPP operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said they needed more time to ensure they could vet the 26 containers according to the strict new safety procedures established to prevent a repeat of the 2014 accidents. The “evaluation processes for these waste streams are new, very thorough, and time consuming,” the agency and its contractor wrote.
The process is apparently more consuming than the agency realized as recently as March, when Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, told attendees of the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix that the remaining above-ground waste at WIPP would be interred “in the next few weeks.”
Among other things, DOE is trying to certify that no potentially flammable material makes it underground at WIPP. The 2014 radiation release was blamed on an explosive chemical reaction between organic cat litter and nitrate salts.
