The Energy Department’s final review of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s recovery effort uncovered 21 punch-list items the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office and contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership must address before the mine can reopen after its nearly three-year pause.
In addition to those 21 so-called corrective actions, DOE prescribed 15 fixes that the local field office and contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) can tackle after the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) reopens, according to a Wednesday press release.
Reopening WIPP “before the end of December is still our goal, but we will take the time necessary to ensure it can be done safely,” Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said in the release.
DOE briefed NWP last Friday on the results of the two-week agency operational readiness review that unearthed the corrective actions. Agency officials had planned to share the results of that review with the public in a webcast WIPP town hall this week, but has now rescheduled the meeting for Dec. 15 “to provide sufficient time to review the findings,” the agency said Wednesday.
Besides the punch-list items from the agency’s review, NWP also has to do some significant mine maintenance in Panel 7: an underground waste-disposal zone the size of a football field that sustained a cave-in last month. WIPP’s naturally shifting salt walls and ceilings require periodic maintenance that DOE and NWP have dialed back since an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground shut down the mine in 2014.
The mine upkeep and the path to reopening figure to feature in next week’s WIPP town hall, which will be streamed online.
Meanwhile, DOE and NWP this week filed three regulatory documents required by the New Mexico Environment Department to resume waste disposal at WIPP.
The state agency, which issued DOE and NWP their WIPP operating permit, completed its own inspection of the mine this week. Whether that review uncovered any showstoppers is not known; New Mexico Environment Department spokeswoman Allison Majure did not reply to a request for comment this week.
Among the documents filed is an underground compliance plan New Mexico demanded after the 2014 accidents at WIPP. The plan, sent to the regulator on Tuesday, spells out how DOE and its contractor will, among other things, continue to monitor the WIPP underground for radiation, shifting walls and ceilings, and volatile organic compounds produced by diesel-fueled mining equipment.
In addition, DOE and NWP submitted five permit modification requests to New Mexico on Monday. In a single dispatch to Santa Fe, the permittees sought changes related to emergency response training and hardware requirements, and inspections performed at WIPP by contractor personnel. In some cases, the proposed tweaks would bring the permit in line with some of the new safety procedures NWP created to avoid a repeat of the 2014 accidents.
Accident Settlement: $4 Million Down, Millions More to Go
Apart from DOE’s extra chin-scratching over the latest operational readiness review and its raft of regulatory filings this week, the New Mexico Environment Department signed off on the $4 million emergency operations center DOE opened in Carlsbad back in April.
The center is one of more than $70 million worth of state infrastructure improvements mandated by a January settlement over the 2014 accidents that closed WIPP.
On Monday, Kathryn Roberts, director of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Resource Protection Division, officially acknowledged the state’s approval of the new operations center in letter to Shrader and Philip Breidenbach, president and project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership.
DOE officially informed New Mexico on Sept. 30 that the emergency center was completed and equipped as agreed under the settlement. The agency hosted a ribbon cutting for the center this spring, which drew local and state VIPs.
