The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking public comment on the proposed five-year recertification of the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
The Energy Department filed the compliance recertification application with the EPA in March. The WIPP Land Withdrawal Act requires EPA recertification every five years to ensure underground disposal of transuranic waste is being done safely at the site near the city of Carlsbad.
Congress gave the EPA authority to monitor public radiation dose and ground water protection standards at WIPP – and to ensure the site will be safe for 10,000 years after the facility accepts its final waste for disposal. In addition, the act required the regulator to determine if WIPP complies with the Clean Air Act and the Solid Waste Disposal Act.
The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking comments on all aspects of the DOE’s recertification application, according to a Federal Register notice Wednesday. The agency will decide when the application is “complete,” and more comments could be solicited at that time.
While the recertification process is a wide-ranging look at WIPP, the regulator is most interested in “changes to the disposal system” with the potential to affect WIPP’s compliance with radiation standards.
The Energy Department plan to alter the manner in which the volume of waste is calculated underground is one change the EPA will review.
The DOE and its contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership received a modification to their state waste permit in December, saying waste volume under the Land Withdrawal Act need no longer be based upon the size of the outermost container. Mediation failed to resolve a lawsuit filed by two advocacy organizations challenging the permit modification.
This is DOE’s fourth recertification application for the site following its initial EPA certification in 1998. Ironically, DOE filed its third recertification application with the EPA in March 2014, weeks after an underground radiation leak that kept the facility offline for about three years.
Transuranic waste includes material such as rags, equipment, tools, and sludge, with more than 100 nanocuries per gram of alpha-emitting radioactive isotopes and half-lives of more than 20 years, according to EPA.
While no explicit deadline is listed for comments, the notice indicates all information on the application should be submitted by December. Comments can be emailed to [email protected].
For more information, contact EPA’s Ray Lee, Office of Radiation and Indoor Air, Radiation Protection Division, at [email protected].
WIPP Pulls Even with Last Year’s Shipment Pace
The pace of transuranic waste shipments to WIPP picked up after a slow start to 2019. Although it was still seven shipments behind the 2018 tempo as of the end of August, the disposal facility pulled even as of Sept. 11, the last date for which public data is available.
Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 11 of this year, WIPP received 238 shipments, identical to the shipment figure as of Sept. 11, 2018, according to the site’s publicly searchable database.
The underground salt mine received 225 shipments during the first eight months of this year. Of those shipments, 182 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 20 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, 19 from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, two from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and two from Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
In 2018, WIPP received 232 shipments of transuranic waste through August.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant received 115 shipments of transuranic defense waste during the first five months of 2019, compared to 138 shipments in the same period of 2018. Officials at WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership attribute this year’s slow start to inclement winter weather and a longer-than-normal maintenance outage that stretched from January into the first week of February.
In February 2014, an underground radiation leak forced WIPP offline for about three years. After resuming taking defense-related TRU from DOE generator sites in April 2017, WIPP had received 682 shipments as of Sept. 11. The Idaho National Laboratory has been the top shipper throughout, with 500 as of that date.
Under a 1995 legal settlement between that also includes the state of Idaho, and the U.S. Navy, the Energy Department was supposed to ship 65,000 cubic meters of TRU away from the Idaho National Laboratory by the end of 2018. The agency missed the milestone but says it has shipped nearly all of the waste now.
In 2013, its last full year of operation prior to WIPP received 724 shipments. The Energy Department says WIPP won’t approach that waste disposal rate again until after a new ventilation system is installed around 2022. The new system will enable simultaneous salt mining, waste emplacement, and maintenance. Mining and waste emplacement now must be alternated, which slows the disposal rate.
The new system is designed to increase airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute. That would roughly triple the current level. It would also exceed the pre-2014 level of around 425,000 cubic feet per minute.
