Any maintenance issues at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant were the contractor’s responsibility and not due to a lack of funding, DOE cleanup chief Dave Huizenga said yesterday. A report on the Feb. 5 salt truck fire at the plant found that a lack of proper vehicle maintenance contributed to the event, and an investigation is underway on the Feb. 14 radiation release. “What people need to recognize is that doing proper maintenance to make sure that operations can be conducted safely, that’s not an afterthought or something that you do only if you have money to do it. This is not a money issue,” Huizenga told WC Monitor on the sidelines of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “It’s in the contracts, the money is there for this work to be done and it’s the contractor’s responsibility to make sure that they are doing it.”
HUIZENGA:WIPP MAINTENANCE ISSUES CONTRACTOR’S RESPONSIBILITY
SRS resumes shipping remote-handled TRU waste to WIPP
The Department of Energy has sent its first shipment of remote-handled transuranic waste since 2009 from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) using a new shipping container. Remote-handled waste is more radioactive than contact-handled transuranic (TRU) waste, which accounts for the vast majority of TRU waste disposed […]