CARLSBAD, N.M. — Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Monday put the incoming Donald Trump administration on notice that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) ― the nation’s only deep-underground nuclear waste disposal site ― is too important to fail.
Less than two weeks before the president who nominated him leaves office, Moniz headlined a group of VIPs who toured WIPP to mark the mine’s official grand reopening from a nearly three-year shutdown prompted by a pair of accidents.
“The main point is that WIPP is so central to what the department is doing in managing this legacy waste,” Moniz told reporters here. “There’s no way anyone can walk away from it. So it has to work.”
WIPP is the final resting place for transuranic waste: material and equipment irradiated during the production of nuclear weapons and other nuclear hardware for the U.S. military. Such waste is piled up around the country at a number of DOE sites.
On Jan. 4, less than two weeks after DOE announced the facility was clear to reopen, WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership placed a shipment of transuranic waste underground for the first time since 2014. This marked the start of operations that, before the end of Trump’s first term in office, could fill up most of the waste-disposal space already mined out at WIPP.
It will take about three years for WIPP’s Panel 7 disposal area to fill up with waste, Nuclear Waste Partnership President Philip Breidenbach said in an interview at the mine here. That means sometime soon, the contractor will have to mine out more space — which is impossible until underground ventilation is increased at WIPP, where airflow has been restricted since the radiation leak and unrelated underground fire in 2014.
Breidenbach’s timeline for filling Panel 7 assumes WIPP receives five waste shipments a week from across the agency’s weapons complex starting in March or so. Before WIPP takes on any new shipments, DOE and NWP must clear out the mine’s Waste Handling Building, which currently houses more than 200 waste containers marooned above ground after the 2014 accidents.
DOE has not said when it would allow former weapons sites across the country to ship their transuranic waste to WIPP, or which site would be first to ship after that all-clear arrives. Some transuranic waste packaged before the 2014 accidents must be recertified to ship under the strict new WIPP waste acceptance criteria approved in July.
