New Mexico Lays Out Steps DOE Must Take Before Reopening WIPP

As the closure of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant nears the seven month mark, New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn listed a range of steps the state needs the Department of Energy to take before it can reopen the facility. If those steps are followed and the recovery is expedited, limited operations could resume by the end of 2015, rather than the early 2016 date in the draft recovery plan DOE and the contractor are developing, Flynn said in a speech yesterday at the annual RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nevada. The steps include:

• Identification of the root cause of the release and verifying it by an independent peer-reviewed team. “We the state will not allow WIPP to reopen until we know what caused the release and until we are confident that this problem will not occur again,” Flynn said;
• Closure of the remaining unclosed panels at WIPP, starting with Panel 6, which contains nitrate salt-bearing waste that is thought to have contributed to the release;
• The DOE’s Office of Environmental Management should take over management of all legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is currently managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration, according to Flynn;
• Elimination of the “silo effect” among the numerous entities responsible for overseeing and regulating WIPP operations. “By dividing up these responsibilities it created a silo effect, and there is a lack of accountability among these different entities,” Flynn said;
• DOE should appoint a manager at Carlsbad “who is empowered by senior leadership to make decisions and act quickly, who can coordinate from the center of the operation,” Flynn said. “It’s not good to have people who are constantly looking over their shoulder and go back to D.C. to get approval of certain critical decisions along the way.”

New Mexico remains committed to reopening the facility, Flynn emphasized. “If we do all of those things we can really push this forward. The state is 100 percent supportive of the WIPP facility,” he said. “This facility is too important to fail. This facility must be successful. I’m absolutely convinced that we can get this facility open, and I think we can resume limited operations by the end of 2015 if we work very hard.”