The recently reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) could be ready to accept new shipments of nuclear waste from across the Energy Department’s nuclear complex by May, under an ambitious schedule being discussed internally in Carlsbad, N.M.
For that to happen, WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) must bury transuranic waste marooned above ground at the site’s Waste Handling Building by February — a goal the agency and its contractor have considered, a source said this week.
Legally, DOE and NWP have until much later to empty the Waste Handling Building, which has about 40,000 square meters of storage space but was built as a temporary stop for waste on its way underground, not long-term storage. The New Mexico Environment Department, WIPP’s primary state regulator, cleared the mine to reopen late last year and prodded NWP to clear out the Waste Handling Building by June 30 and stop using the facility for indefinite storage.
Todd Shrader, DOE’s top WIPP official, has said the mine could accept new waste shipments two to three months after interring the waste now stored above ground at the site.
WIPP, some 40 miles southeast by road from Carlsbad, is the nation’s only deep-underground repository for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste. The Department of Energy on Dec. 23 authorized the mine to reopen after a nearly three-year recovery operation precipitated by an accidental radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in February 2014. The recovery cost DOE about $1.5 billion, including NWP’s management and operations contract. Getting underground ventilation back up to pre-accident levels is expected to push the total bill for the recovery closer to $2 billion.
On Jan. 4, only 12 days after the mine reopened, NWP moved waste underground for the first time since 2014, taking several hours to put the equivalent of roughly 5 cubic meters of waste — about 28 oil drums’ worth — in Room 6 of WIPP’s immense, rad-contaminated Panel 7 waste disposal area. Another load was scheduled to go underground Jan. 10.
Panel 7 is where an improperly packaged barrel of waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory ruptured in 2014.
Once shipments to WIPP resume, the mine will accept about five shipments a week from across the DOE complex, the agency has said. Prior to the 2014 accidents, the mine took more than 15 shipments a week.
As of Dec. 31, 2015, there were nearly 45,000 cubic meters of contact-handled transuranic waste destined for WIPP stored across 14 sites in the agency’s nuclear complex, plus almost another 2,500 cubic meters of the more dangerous, more radioactive remote-handled transuranic waste at 11 sites, according to DOE’s 2016 Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report.
Those figures, released Dec. 1, do not include transuranic waste expected to be generated by ongoing and future cleanup operations, DOE said in the report.
The department has implied, although not confirmed, that transuranic waste from the Idaho National Laboratory will be first to ship.
“DOE has informed us that shipment of INL transuranic waste to WIPP is one of the highest priorities after emplacement of material currently housed above ground at WIPP,” Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden wrote in a Thursday email to Weapons Complex Monitor.
More than 20,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste are stored at Idaho, the vast majority of which is contact-handled, according to DOE’s 2016 inventory report. It is the largest backlog of transuranic waste at any DOE site. The department is legally obliged to remove transuranic waste from Idaho by Dec. 31, 2018.
The Idaho National Laboratory, like all DOE sites, cannot ship its transuranic waste to WIPP until the material has been packaged in accordance with the strict new waste acceptance criteria the department approved in July. That has created some headaches in cases where waste packaged under the old acceptance criteria had to be recertified under the stricter new criteria.
At Idaho, “DOE has advised my office that some of the transuranic waste has been recertified, but that it is uncertain when the recertification process will be completed,” Wasden said.
DOE has not yet decided which sites will ship waste to WIPP first. Even the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which has already gotten rid of nearly all its transuranic waste, does not know where it stands.
The former plutonium production site near Aiken, S.C. — still an active chemical separations facility and home to a DOE national laboratory — is in the middle of auditing its remaining transuranic waste and will not be finished until around March, Robert Yanity, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Environmental Health and Control, said by email Friday.
The Savannah River Site “is reviewing procedures and support documentation for previously certified wastes in preparation for recertification [and] shipments when WIPP is reopened [and ] are unaware of where they are in the queue for shipments,” Yanity wrote.
One thing about the WIPP shipping queue has long been certain: the Hanford Site in Washington state is dead last in line.
“The [WIPP] reopening won’t be apparent here for years,” Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington Department of Ecology, wrote in a Thursday email. “Hanford is at the bottom of the list and isn’t scheduled to begin shipping waste until 2024 at the earliest.”
Moreover, Hanford — also a former plutonium production site — is home to the largest tranche of remote-handled transuranic at any DOE site, with 2,000 or so cubic meters stored there already. WIPP is not accepting remote-handled transuranic waste now, and DOE has yet to announce any plan for reopening the mine to such dangerous material.
“There currently is no facility to treat and package remote-handled waste and certify it for shipment to WIPP,” Bradbury stated. “This is a serious problem. Treating and packing remote-handled waste for WIPP will create a lot of shipments for a relatively small amount of waste. And WIPP has a limit on the number of curies of remote-handled waste it can accept — Hanford’s waste alone exceeds that limit.”
The Energy Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week, except to say it refused to share how much transuranic waste is stored in the Waste Handling Building at WIPP.