After five years, the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has resumed shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The waste is largely from research and isotope production operations previously carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to a press release from DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management. The material was due to be shipped in 2014, but WIPP stopped receiving waste transports following a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February of that year.
The underground mine near the city of Carlsbad reopened in December and in April began receiving shipments from other DOE facilities, starting with the Idaho National Laboratory, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and privately operated Waste Control Specialists complex in Texas.
Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center has not sent treated waste to WIPP since 2012. The DOE press release did not cite the amount of waste carried in the first shipment, but said multiple shipments are anticipated each month. Additional details, including the amount of waste to be transported from Oak Ridge, were not immediately available.
“Resuming shipments has been an important priority for our program due to the large inventory of processed waste that is stored in onsite facilities. These shipments will remove risk from our site and help fulfill our commitments to the state of Tennessee,” Jay Mullis, acting manager of the Oak Ridge EM office, said in the release. “This was only possible through a lot of hard work from the federal and contractor employees here and support from staff in Carlsbad.”
