After the surprise announcement that it will close part of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and sacrifice several football fields’ worth of storage space in the process, the Energy Department this week told local officials it could start pulling out of the mine’s collapsing, contaminated southern end by the end of the year.
A critical first step to closure includes installing an underground ceiling support system known as cribbing to prevent cracks in WIPP’s naturally shifting salt ceiling from creeping into the still-needed north end of the facility from the mine’s disused southern end. A second task: relocating an electrical substation that services soon-to-be-abandoned southerly areas.
“By the end of the year they will have suspended operations in the south end of the mine and they will move the substation,” John Heaton, president of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
Bill Taylor and Tim Runyon, spokesmen for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, did not respond to a request for comment this week.
Heaton and other members of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force met Tuesday in Carlsbad with officials from DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), the agency’s prime contractor for WIPP.
While DOE has been cagey about its timeline for starting what Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office, estimates will be four to five weeks’ worth of closure work, there will be some public indicators of the agency’s progress.
For example, DOE’s WIPP operating permit from the New Mexico Environment Department requires the agency and Nuclear Waste Partnership to notify the state at least 60 days in advance of beginning any partial closure. That means if DOE and its contractor have not already notified state environment officials, they have only until Nov. 1 to do so if they mean to start closure work by Dec. 31.
Allison Majure, spokeswoman for the New Mexico Environment Department, did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
The potentially longest part of the process, Heaton said, is getting the required authorization from the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Both regulators must give the nod before DOE can declare mission complete on the partial closure. How long that might take is an open question — all agencies involved are in uncharted waters, beginning the closure process well before any of them expected to do so — but Heaton thought final sign-off might take a year or more.
Nuclear Waste Partnership workers discovered three ceiling collapses at WIPP between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4. All three happened in sections of the mine where waste disposal areas have long been filled up and sealed off, and where workers are not permitted. Nobody was hurt in the collapses, DOE has said.
DOE has not performed routine mine maintenance in these areas since the 2014 underground radiation release that contaminated some of WIPP’s southerly reaches and prompted the agency to suspend waste disposal operations site-wide.
Now, the agency has deemed it too costly and too dangerous to repair the mine’s southern end. The upside of the closure, from DOE’s perspective, is that it eliminates a swath of radioactively contaminated pathways that workers would have had to cross during mine repairs using cumbersome protective gear that make everything from mine upkeep to waste emplacement more difficult.
Heaton pointed out Tuesday that a smaller mine means better air circulation underground, which is critical for mine upkeep that requires diesel-fueled equipment. An interim ventilation system just switched on at WIPP in August will increase underground airflow to 110,000 cubic feet per minute from the current 60,000 cubic feet per minute. That is expected to be enough airflow for workers to safely dispose of about five waste shipments a week, once WIPP reopens.
DOE plans to close all areas of WIPP south of the east-west-running drift 2750. That will permanently block access to four disposal panels — each containing seven football-field-sized rooms — and also seal away some of the radioactive contamination that leaked into the mine in 2014, when a barrel of improperly packaged transuranic waste from The Los Alamos National Laboratory burst open. DOE plans to block off the area with salt piles and use cribbing to stabilize the ceiling, Heaton said.
Shrader said last week the storage space the agency will lose in the partial closure would not be needed for years.
The Department of Energy has said it wants to reopen WIPP by December or January and accept new shipments of transuranic waste from across the U.S. nuclear complex by April. Shrader tiptoed around that date in a town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad last week, telling the local and online audience that “if it takes a little bit longer, it takes a little bit longer.”
