A new 10-year draft permit for the Department of Energy’s underground transuranic waste disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M., will prioritize legacy waste from cleanup activities over new waste resulting from the impending ramp-up in plutonium pit production at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New Mexico Environment Department said late Tuesday.

The settlement heads off a public battle over the future of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), which operates on an expired, administratively extended permit. 

The state Environment Department said the deal increases regulatory oversight and safeguards, greenlights development of two new hazardous waste disposal panels over the next decade and will also prioritize legacy waste from cleanup activities, including those ongoing at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The New Mexico Environment Department was contacted to clarify how legacy waste would be prioritized over new waste from pit production but did not respond by deadline. 

But Los Alamos is set to make a lot more waste, although that new waste won’t emerge from the lab until halfway through this new permit period or later. There are also options for temporary on-site storage or disposing of some of it alongside legacy waste. 

The lab is hell-bent on producing 30 plutonium pits per year for the primary triggers for new nuclear weapons by the end of the decade, if not sooner. The process, performed at LANL’s PF4 Plutonium Facility, will generate some 2,000 canisters of transuranic waste annually once it begins producing 30 pits a year, Richard Baca, the deputy chief of staff for the NNSA’s office of safety, infrastructure and operations, said at the Monitor’s 2021 Nuclear Deterrence Summit.

LANL is gearing up to process the waste from the ramp-up in pit production, as the Monitor saw during a recent tour of the facility, including PF4. LANL’s Central Characterization program examines every item that comes out of a glovebox in PF4, where plutonium pits are studied, engineered and assembled. The waste is then carefully placed in 55-gallon waste drums specially designed to contain fissile material or irradiated equipment. Larger basins about the size and shape of a hot tub are used to contain larger waste items before they are shipped to WIPP. 

WIPP is the only deep-underground permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste in the country. It also will be the final resting place for waste from the larger of the NNSA’s two pit production facilities, Savannah River in South Carolina, tasked with making at least 50 pits per year sometime in the 2030s. 

Waste disposal is an essential part of pit production, which cannot commence until there are plans for the waste that results from refining plutonium and other isotopes for use in nuclear weapons. 

Asked at the 2021 summit what the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility would do with its waste streams if WIPP became suddenly unavailable, Baca said “let me get back to you.” The answer was met with nervous laughter from the audience. 

The Department of Energy said in a statement that the new permit “lays the groundwork for a full and open discussion regarding the future plans for WIPP and transuranic waste from generator sites across the country.”

The state said the deal includes some stipulations sought by Santa Fe, including requiring DOE to document progress in siting another geologic repository outside New Mexico. This was something pushed by citizen groups who opposed a “Forever WIPP.”

The state will publish the WIPP permit with the modified conditions on Aug. 15, and a  public meeting will be held Sept. 22 to discuss the permit renewal. The final permit will be issued in October and take effect 30 days later, the state’s press release said.

“Communities in New Mexico and around the U.S. benefit from the clean-up of legacy waste and its disposal at WIPP,” said New Mexico Environment Department Cabinet Secretary James Kenney in the release. “The new permit conditions affirm New Mexico’s authority and position that all roads lead from WIPP – we are no longer the last stop for clean-up but the driving force in that process that begins here.”