For the first time in 15 years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is making shipments of transuranic waste to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a lab spokesman said this week.
Three shipments left Lawrence Livermore for WIPP during the week of Sept. 21, one week after a single shipment was sent to the New Mexico site, Livermore spokesman Nolan O’Brien wrote in an email. Livermore crews expect to make three shipments per week for at least the next four or five weeks, he said.
The recent activity marks the first transuranic shipments out of Livermore since 2010, when it sent several to Idaho National Laboratory, O’Brien said. ” Our last shipments to WIPP were in 2005,” he added.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board discussed the shipments in a staff report dated Sept. 4 and recently posted on the board’s webpage. The independent federal nuclear health and safety watchdog said it got its information on the Livermore shipments from an eight-week rolling schedule issued by DOE on Aug. 20.
None of the Livermore shipments have shown up yet on the Department of Energy’s online WIPP Waste Information System as of Thursday, but there is typically a lag time of about two weeks before shipments appear on the public site.
The shipping campaign now underway will significantly reduce the lab’s inventory, O’Brien said. An estimated 350-400 containers will remain, even at the end of the campaign that started late last month, he added. Given that Livermore continues to generate transuranic waste as a result of its programmatic mission, shipments to WIPP will happen as needed in order to minimize the inventories.
The transuranic waste produced at Livermore consists primarily of debris, including personal protective equipment, cleaning materials, and small tools and components laboratory scale glovebox work, O’Brien said. A smaller subset is from solidified inorganic and organic material from research and development activities, he added.
The current Livermore shipments to WIPP were also mentioned Sept. 9 by James McConnell, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s administrator for safety, infrastructure and operations, during a presentation at the ExchangeMonitor’s virtual RadWaste Summit.
Developed as a competing nuclear-weapons design lab to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1950s, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory continues to lead key nuclear weapons work for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The lab is the design agency for the upcoming W80-4 and W87-1 programs to refurbish air-launched cruise missile warheads and intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, respectively.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reopened in early 2017 after a nearly three-year closure following an underground radiation leak in February 2014.
2020 Not Going Well for WIPP Shipments
There have been 121 shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant from Jan. 1 through Aug. 31 of this year. That compares with 225 from the first eight months of 2019.
The underground disposal facility averaged emplacement of slightly more than 28 shipments per month during the first two-thirds of 2019. However, during the same period in 2020 the average is just over 15 shipments per month.
The falloff is due to a confluence of factors according to the site’s Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership, prime contractor. The contractor cites harsh winter weather and a prolonged maintenance outage during the first quarter. Then of course there is the coronavirus pandemic that caused DOE to dramatically scale back work at the Waste Isolation Pilot plant and other nuclear cleanup operations from late March to late May.
The underground salt mine site continues to experience delays ramping up to full throughput because of COVID-19, according to a document filed recently with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
“By the end of August some of the personnel in quarantine [because of potential exposure to the virus] had been cleared and returned to the site, and WIPP started to receive waste again at an average rate of five shipments per week,” according to a board staff report dated Sept. 4. The prime, however, started segregating crews onsite “to minimize cross-over and to reduce the likelihood of COVID-19 transmission.”
As of Thursday, the waste disposal facility has confirmed 39 cases of COVID-19 this year, and 22 of those individuals have recovered, the DOE prime contractor for the site said Thursday via Twitter.
Of the 2020 shipments through the first eight months of this year, 73 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 38 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and 10 from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
There were 12 shipments to WIPP during August: eight from Idaho and four from Los Alamos.
September got off to a somewhat more promising start with 12 shipments received during the first 16 days of the month, according to the latest data.
