As soon as Thursday, the Energy Department could declare it is ready to once again dispose of nuclear waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant after a nearly three-year pause.
At 8:30 p.m. Eastern time that day, DOE and the city of Carlsbad, N.M., plan to webcast their latest quarterly Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) town hall meeting. The forum coincides closely with the end of DOE’s two-week final exam of both WIPP itself, and the new safety protocols prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) put in place to prevent a repeat of the 2014 underground radiation release that closed the mine.
NWP must fix any problems DOE found during this so-called operational readiness review before the agency gives the all-clear to reopen WIPP. DOE reps are all but certain to face questions about their findings at Thursday’s meeting. Depending on how many punch-list items DOE found, the mine could reopen later this month. The New Mexico Environment Department, WIPP’s state regulator, has final say on whether the mine may reopen.
DOE soft-pedaled the end of the crucial review in its latest official communique from Carlsbad, burying the news beneath updates on mine maintenance in a Dec.1 press release. Likewise, the agency has billed the upcoming WIPP town hall as “a special Town Hall focused on mining and ground control,” not as a recap of the review, or a schedule update.
Ground control refers to the periodic wall and ceiling repairs necessary to keep WIPP’s naturally shifting underground caverns from collapsing. There have been four such collapses in WIPP since September, all in areas where maintenance has been reduced or suspended after the 2014 radiation release.
The latest collapse, in early November, happened in the expansive waste-storage area called Panel 7: the same multi-room area where an improperly packaged container of waste burst open in 2014. DOE has stepped up mine repairs in Panel 7 and plans to use some rooms within it for waste disposal after WIPP reopens.
Periodic mine collapses have prompted DOE to seal off WIPP’s southern end, which includes mostly rooms that are already full of waste. That work has not yet started in earnest; in late November, the agency asked the New Mexico Environment Department for the permit modification necessary for the partial mine closure.
