The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is ramping up operations that have been reduced for months in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no set schedule for a return to prior waste emplacement levels, according to the head of the Department of Energy contractor for the facility.
“I unfortunately don’t have a time frame for that. It’s going to depend on the statistics locally as well as regionally, and obtaining approval from the Department of Energy,” Nuclear Waste Partnership President and Project Manager Sean Dunagan said Tuesday during a session at the American Nuclear Society’s annual meeting, which this year is being conducted solely online.
Like most Energy Department facilities, WIPP in March dropped to mission-critical operations to reduce the number of on-site personnel and help curb the potential spread of the viral disease.
Since then, the transuranic waste repository has on average received five shipments per week from other Energy Department sites, Dunagan said. That is down from an average of 10 weekly prior to the federal public health emergency.
“There have been some weeks where there were no shipments,” he said. “Most weeks have approximately five shipments, there have been some with between two to four, but usually it’s around five.”
Mining of waste disposal Panel 8 has been suspended, though ground control operations in the salt mine continue, Dunagan added.
The Energy Department is following a four-part plan for restaffing its headquarters buildings and other locations: from Phase 0, which is mostly planning, to Phase 3, which would be a return to near-standard occupancy levels. WIPP was authorized on June 1 to move to Phase 1, which involves preliminary callbacks for a limited number of personnel.
“That is not a huge increase in actual operations. For some of our capital projects it is a little bit of an increase there,” Dunagan said. “It’ll be similar for the Phase 2. Phase 3 is really when you’re going to see us get back up to full operations in terms of number of shipments.”
The facility has received 90 shipments to date during fiscal 2020, which began on Oct. 1, 2019. That was impacted by the pandemic, but also an extended maintenance outage from February to March, Dunagan noted.
Nuclear Waste Partnership expects to fill Panel 7 in summer 2021. Panel 8 should be ready four months before it is needed to begin taking waste, according to Dunagan. The stop on mining the new panel is currently balanced by the slowdown in placing waste into Panel 7. WIPP is configured for eight panels, with two more planned.
Panel 7 was the location of a February 2014 radiation release, after a waste drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico overheated and burst open. The Energy Department stopped shipments to WIPP for nearly three years while it remediated the contamination.
Under the 1992 federal legislation to establish the facility, WIPP can take a total of 175,000 cubic meters of waste. As of June 3 it held 97,880 cubic meters.
Since opening in 1999, the site has received more than 12,000 shipments from Los Alamos, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and other Energy Department locations.
Nuclear Waste Partnership and its subcontractors have continued work on capital projects during the personnel drawdown, including a fifth utility shaft and safety significant confinement ventilation system that will boost airflow levels back to pre-accident levels. The ventilation system is scheduled to begin operations in 2022.
Prior to February 2014, airflow in the mine was about 425,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM). That was slashed to 60,000 CFM immediately afterward, to prevent the spread of radioactive contaminants. Interim measures since then have pushed airflow levels to 180,000 CFM, but that is still not sufficient, Dunagan said.
“This has greatly impacted our ability to do work in the underground, primarily simultaneously,” he said. “Before 2014 we could emplace waste, we would mine, and we could do ground control all at the same time because there was plenty of air in the underground. Since 2014 we only have sufficient air to do one of those activities at the time.”
