While the Energy Department still has not said which of its cleanup sites will first send waste to the reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, recent correspondence between the New Mexico Environment Department and the agency shows DOE has made headway in approving shipments from three of the five sites on its shortlist.
In a Feb. 28 letter, a senior New Mexico official said the state will soon resume reviews of DOE transuranic waste audits conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory before the February 2014 radiation leak that shut down WIPP for nearly three years.
The official also noted progress at DOE’s Idaho and Oak Ridge, Tenn., sites which along with Los Alamos make up three of the five sites the department has said will ship to WIPP between April and January.
At Idaho and Oak Ridge, DOE has found “no combination of waste, waste treatment processes and waste management practices at these sites that could have contributed to the WIPP radiological release and that the assessed programs are processing TRU [transuranic] waste in a manner compliant with the WIPP Permit and the WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria,” John Kieling, chief of the New Mexico Environment Department’s hazardous waste bureau, wrote in a notice to DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader and NWP President Philip Breidenbach.
The other two sites on DOE’s shortlist to ship to WIPP are: the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.; and the privately operated Waste Control Specialists complex near Andrews, Texas, which stores transuranic waste from the same Los Alamos-generated stream blamed for the WIPP radiation incident.
Meanwhile, as a means of warming up locals to the resumption of transuranic waste shipments to WIPP from across DOE’s national weapons complex, the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office hosted a show-and-tell today in Carlsbad, N.M., featuring trucks and waste containers of the sort that soon will begin crossing the desert to WIPP. Carlsbad is about 40 miles west by road from WIPP.
A second road show was scheduled for Thursday in Hobbs, N.M., some 50 miles northeast by road from WIPP.
The Energy Department and Nuclear Waste Partnership did not immediately reply to requests for comment Wednesday.
