Already months behind schedule, dress rehearsal waste-disposal operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., have been extended another two weeks due to unspecified equipment issues, an executive with the mine’s prime contractor said in a Thursday town hall meeting.
Workers at the Department fo Energy transuanric wase storage site on June 1 began what was supposed to be an eight-week exercise known internally as cold operations. During cold operations, Nuclear Waste Partnership uses waste containers packed with non-nuclear materials to practice the tighter new waste-disposal procedures outlined in a voluminous new safety document known as a Documented Safety Analysis.
“They’ve been doing that for about eight weeks now, we are going to extend that for two more weeks because of some equipment issues that we had,” Jim Blankenhorn, NWP vice president and recovery project manager, said during a WIPP town hall webcast from Carlsbad City Council chambers.
Nuclear Waste Partnership did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, at Weapons Complex Monitor’s deadline, about the nature of the equipment failures Blankenhorn mentioned. Blankenhorn himself did not expound on the matter during the town hall.
A source familiar with the situation said the issues were related to the underground transporter workers use to haul waste around the mine. According to this person, cold operations now are slated to end Aug. 15.
Cold operations began more than three months late, because the Documented Safety Analysis, which spells out new waste-handling procedures, was itself delivered more than three months late, according to the WIPP Integrated Baseline the agency and its contractor published in February.
That schedule projects a Dec. 12 restart, nine months later than the March 2016 reopening date DOE projected for WIPP in a previous public schedule. The mine has been shut down since 2014, following an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire. DOE acknowledged in mid-July WIPP likely would not reopen Dec. 12.
The manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office on Thursday would not say exactly how far behind schedule the WIPP reopening is running. The agency’s own schedule suggests a delay of about three months, so far.
The WIPP Integrated Baseline from February shows 72 days, counting weekends and holidays, of what DOE and its contractor call “schedule uncertainty buffer.” Again counting weekends and holidays, the Documented Safety Analysis — which was approved May 29 — was delivered 100 days after the deadline set in the WIPP Integrated Baseline.
Asked how many days’ worth of margin the ongoing delays have consumed, Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office, refused to provide a figure, repeating the agency line that a “significant” amount of time has been burned.
Currently, cold operations and subsequent contractor and DOE reviews of those operations represent the critical path to reopening WIPP. The critical path is, in engineering parlance, the series of activities that will take the longest to complete.
Meanwhile, a ventilation upgrade that was supposed to be done in April is on track to be finished later this month, Blankenhorn said.
The so-called Interim Ventilation System would increase underground airflow at WIPP to roughly 110,000 cubic feet per minute — enough for workers to safely dispose of about five waste shipments a week. Normal mine maintenance competes with waste disposal for airflow, because maintenance requires diesel-fueled equipment whose emissions must be pumped out of the underground.
Blankenhorn said Nuclear Waste Partnership recently completed its own review of the Interim Ventilation System and is now waiting on DOE to perform a separate review, which “is scheduled to occur next week.” It could be days or weeks after that before DOE gives the all-clear to start up the new ventilation system, but the contractor currently expects that to happen this month, Blankenhorn said.
The same day DOE and its contractor spoke in Carlsbad, the Government Accountability Office in Washington released a report that found delaying WIPP’s reopening from March to December piled almost $65 million on to the cost of the restart.
Including that increase, DOE expects to spend about $245 million on WIPP recovery over the four years ending 2017. That, however, is only the cost for mine repairs, accident investigation, and other activities such as the new Documented Safety Analysis that would not have been necessary had the accidents never taken place. Over the same four years, DOE would spend an additional $1 billion to keep NWP on the job during the recovery — money that otherwise would have paid for normal waste emplacement and operations.
