In a letter to the local Carlsbad Current-Argus newspaper Monday, two local New Mexico officials clamored for Congress to bump up the budget for maintenance at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in fiscal 2018.
“A significant infrastructure failure could put us back where we were in 2014 — facing several years with a complete inability to receive and emplace shipments,” Carlsbad Mayor Dale Janway and John Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, wrote in the letter to the editor.
In their letter, the two officials said WIPP needs “a new fire suppression system, IT upgrades, hoist upgrades, significant electrical upgrades and major building repairs.”
Legislation approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 20 would for fiscal 2018 provide “$10,000,000 above the budget request to address maintenance backlog issues” at WIPP, according to the detailed spending report that accompanied the bill. Overall, the Senate’s bill would give WIPP around $300 million for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
The Senate’s bill report did not quantify the total proposed maintenance spend at WIPP for next year. In its fiscal 2018 budget request, unveiled in May, DOE estimated maintenance costs at WIPP for the year would total about $27 million.
The House of Representatives, in a bill passed last week before the chamber adjourned for its August recess, proposed a total 2018 budget of roughly $323 million for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. That about meets DOE’s request.
The House’s bill also meets the White House’s funding request for new construction at WIPP and would provide the roughly $65 million the administration sought to improve the facility’s underground ventilation system. The Senate’s bill would provide only about $40 million for those projects.
WIPP is the only deep-underground disposal site for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste. Such material, in DOE nomenclature, comes only from defense nuclear activities. The deep-underground mine near Carlsbad, N.M., reopened late last year after a nearly three-year closure brought about by an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in 2014.
