In a supplemental environmental analysis this week the Department of Energy reiterates it sees a role for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico into the 2080s, which might strain the already tense relationship with state regulators.
The DOE’s Office of Environmental Management foresees a need for eventual excavation of seven more underground panels to dispose of transuranic (TRU) waste at the salt mine site near Carlsbad. This would be beyond the two panels, 11 and 12, already well into the planning and approval stages, according to the document.
“Due to concerns for worker safety,” DOE wrote, it gave up on the planned panel 9 and bypassed “several of the disposal rooms in Panel 7,” following an underground radiological accident in February 2014. The accident effectively removed WIPP from service for about three years.
The additional panels are numbered 13 through 19, according to the 100-page document released this week.
“TRU waste disposal would occur until approximately 2083, which is 50 years longer than the 35 years evaluated in the 1997” supplemental analysis to an existing Environmental Impact Statement,” DOE said in this week’s document.
In the supplemental analysis, DOE indicated it cannot simply shutter WIPP in the 2030s.
“The DOE is currently legally bound by agreements and orders concerning TRU waste management and disposal,” the Environmental Management office said in the supplemental analysis.
“If the DOE does not take action, the situation would jeopardize the ability to meet these legally binding agreements and orders, stop TRU waste cleanup at generators/storage sites across the nation, and potentially impact the national security mission of the agency as related to TRU waste risk reduction,” DOE said in the document. “The DOE would need to develop an alternate disposition path for TRU waste stored at and to be generated at generator sites beyond currently-approved disposal panels.”
While it signals the need for additional panels, the DOE document does not propose to change the more than 175,000 cubic meters of waste that WIPP could dispose of under the Land Withdrawal Act.
The document is formally called a supplemental analysis for the Proposed Action to Excavate and Use Additional Disposal Panels at the WIPP Facility, DOE announced Monday.
The new DOE document comes out at a time when the New Mexico Environment Department is at odds with the federal government over a second state permit modification for WIPP in three years. Among other things, the state is pushing for waste shipments to WIPP from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to become a higher priority.