The Energy Department is seeking public comment until Jan. 15 on plans to build a 65,280- cubic-foot above-ground concrete storage facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for contact-handled transuranic waste.
The comment period opened Dec. 15 on the draft environmental assessment, required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The surface storage facility should give WIPP extra flexibility to cope with fluctuations in waste shipping schedules and emplacement, according to the draft EA.
“Because facility maintenance and transportation-related outages occur, the DOE has identified a mission-related need to develop expanded storage capability for TRU waste at the WIPP facility,” the department said.
The facility would include capacity for up to 408 TRU concrete waste overpack containers, enough to store up to 136 shipments of TRU waste. The above-ground storage would be for as long as 365 days, the environmental document says.
The above-ground storage facility is expected to cost about $8 million, Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), said by email.
Construction of the storage facility is tentatively scheduled to start in 2021, depending on funding and regulatory approvals, according to NWP. The New Mexico Environment Department regulates radioactive material in the state.
Some surface storage already occurs at WIPP on a less-permanent basis at its Waste Handling Building.
Comments on the new project can be submitted electronically to [email protected].
The Energy Department will review the comments prior to issuing a final environmental assessment, which could lead to either a finding of no significant impact or development of an environmental impact statement on the facility.
“DOE has prepared this draft environmental assessment (DEA) to determine whether the potential environmental impacts of the proposed project would be significant to human health and the environment in accordance with DOE’s NEPA implementing procedures,” DOE said in the document.
WIPP is the nation’s only underground storage facility for TRU waste from other DOE facilities. It was closed for nearly three years after two accidents in February 2014.
With Shipments at 130, WIPP Gears up for Maintenance Outage
Since it resumed emplacing transuranic waste again last April, WIPP had received 130 shipments from DOE-approved generator sites as of Dec. 15, 2017.
That is the most recent date for which shipment data is publicly available. During its first 36 weeks of operation since reopening, WIPP averaged 3.6 shipments per week.
Toward the end of 2017, WIPP was averaging between five and six shipments per week. A brief review of the public data indicates that nearly two-thirds of the 2017 shipments disclosed so far, 86 in total, came from the Idaho National Laboratory. The other generator sites, including the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, Waste Control Specialists in Texas, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, were below 20.
The disposal facility will not receive waste during a maintenance outage scheduled for roughly Jan. 15-26, according to information presented at the WIPP Town Hall meeting in December. Work to be conducted during the outage includes applying a new epoxy coating to a floor in the Waste Handling Building and electrical work that can only be done while the power is off.
WIPP has not yet resumed its much-anticipated salt mining operations to carve out additional underground storage space.
