Having completed a two-week maintenance outage, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., can do same-day salt mining and waste disposal at the underground facility, a spokesman said Friday.
The outage finished Jan. 28, and WIPP actually resumed taking transuranic waste the week of Jan. 22, Donavan Mager, a spokesperson for site prime Nuclear Waste Partnership, said by email. The contractor completed 17 different maintenance jobs during the outage, including resurfacing the contact-handled bay floor in the Waste Handling Building and installing additional power to the server room,
Nuclear Waste Partnership is “very close” to hiring a director of mining, he added. The Energy Department directed the addition of a mining chief last September by DOE when it extended NWP’s contract for three years, through September 2020. The extension period is valued at roughly $928 million, DOE has said.
WIPP confirmed in January it has resumed doing limited underground salt mining for the first time since the mine was taken offline following a pair of February 2014 accidents. Transuranic waste disposal resumed in April 2017.
Thanks to deployment of the supplemental ventilation system, WIPP now has the additional airflow needed to do both salt mining and waste disposal at the same time, Mager said. “However, we are taking a crawl-walk-run approach to mining in Panel 8, so waste emplacement and mining activities aren’t regularly taking place at the same time,” Mager said. Total airflow is now roughly 114,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM). Installation of a new permanent ventilation system in 2022 should increase the airflow to about 540,000 CFM.
Mining is now taking place seven days per week on the day shift, while waste emplacement is occurring four days per week on the second shift, roughly 3 p.m. through 1 a.m., the spokesman said.
The latest publicly available data indicates WIPP received seven waste shipments between Jan. 1 and Jan. 11. WIPP received 133 shipments during its roughly nine months of waste operations in 2017.
During 2013, which was WIPP’s last full year of operation, the site received 724 shipments, according to publicly available data. During the 2012 calendar year, WIPP received 839 shipments.
