The Energy Department has canceled a meeting that was expected to be the forum for a major announcement about whether the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would be ready to resume disposal of nuclear waste this year.
Sources said Tuesday DOE canceled the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) town hall scheduled for Thursday. The move will give site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) more time to work through punch-list items — known officially as corrective actions — the agency discovered during its recently completed operational readiness review of the deep-underground salt mine.
The town hall was to be rescheduled for the week of Dec. 12, these sources said. The Energy Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday. December 12 is the day DOE and NWP previously thought they would reopen WIPP, according to the public schedule the agency and its contractor released in February.
Meanwhile, officials with the New Mexico Environment Department were on site at WIPP on Tuesday to complete their own inspection of the mine. It was not clear how long that inspection would take; the state agency must also sign off on reopening WIPP.
One person familiar with DOE’s thinking said the corrective actions prescribed for NWP were relatively minor, and included tweaks to record-keeping software. Another source said the agency wanted to brief the public only after Congress passes another stopgap spending bill to keep WIPP, DOE, and the rest of the federal government funded through March or April.
Federal appropriations will run out Friday, though Congress is expected before then to pass another so-called continuing resolution that will preserve fiscal 2016 spending levels through the spring. New Mexico’s U.S. Senate delegation made the case in November that for fiscal year 2017, WIPP actually needs over $25 million more annually than the budget proposal provides to safely resume disposal of the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
WIPP has been closed since 2014 following an accidental radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire.
