The Energy Department is scheduled on Friday to complete the last agency-led review standing in the way of reopening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for transuranic waste-disposal operations, sources in New Mexico said Wednesday.
DOE is set to conduct its exit interview with WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) in the early afternoon, local time. The interview would cap just over two weeks of WIPP’s final exam with the agency, in which experts from across the DOE complex — independent at least of the Carlsbad Field Office that manages the deep-underground salt mine — assessed whether NWP is ready to begin waste emplacement under the strict new operating procedures the AECOM-led company established to prevent a repeat of the 2014 underground accidents that have shuttered the site for nearly three years.
The department is expected to provide a public update Dec. 8 during a WIPP town hall to be webcast from Carlsbad. The agency may prescribe some corrective actions — punch-list items in a best-case scenario — for NWP before formally giving the nod for reopening WIPP.
Even after that, the facility cannot open until the New Mexico Environment Department says it can. State Environment Secretary Butch Tongate has held somewhat aloof, neither committing to a timetable for beginning the state review nor offering comment on the ongoing DOE operational readiness assessment.
Once WIPP reopens, NWP’s first task will be interring waste that has been marooned above ground at the mine since the underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in 2014. It will take two or three months before WIPP accepts any new shipments of transuranic waste from across the DOE complex, Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said earlier this fall.
