The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state continues to prepare to ship transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico and could start sending drums there within a year, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) update.
In a DNFSB resident inspector report for the week ended June 5, the board said managers at Hanford’s Amentum-led contractor Central Plateau Cleanup “plan to have the capability to complete up to 10 transuranic (TRU) waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant between July and September 2027, pending certification of the TRU waste program.”
This is consistent with the timeline laid out by a Central Plateau Cleanup manager during a panel discussion at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix during March. The manager said Hanford could easily beat the previously-established goal of 2028.
Hanford last sent TRU waste on the 1,500-mile trip to WIPP near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2011. The rupture of an underground TRU waste drum in February 2014 would remove WIPP from service for about three years.
Hanford has roughly 11,000 TRU containers in above ground storage and thousands more that could be retrieved and eventually shipped to WIPP for disposal in the underground salt mine disposal site.
