The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico appears headed for its busiest calendar year since the disposal site reopened in 2017.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received 47 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste during the month of April, based upon a search of DOE’s public website for the facility this week.
There is typically a two-week lag period before all shipments for the month appear on the website. The most recent WIPP shipment recorded online was Friday April 28 based on Monday’s search.
During the first four months of 2023, the underground disposal site took in 146 shipments. By contrast, WIPP received only 19 during April 2022 and 55 for the first four months of 2022.
Last month, WIPP received one shipment from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee; three from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; three from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; 10 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and 30 from the Idaho National Laboratory.
WIPP must attain an even faster pace to attain DOE’s goal of regularly handling 17 shipments per week. That would translate to about 680 shipments annually, assuming 40 weeks of operation, after allowing for governmental and tribal holidays, maintenance outages and severe weather.
WIPP was offline about three years after a drum from Los Alamos overheated and ruptured in February 2014, causing an underground radiation leak that contaminated much of the underground, including Panel 7, where waste disposal ended only last fall.
Since WIPP’s 2017 reopening, WIPP’s best annual mark has been 311 in 2018. The current pace would land in the 435-to-440 range for an entire year. Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors took over as WIPP’s new prime contractor in February, replacing an Amentum-led team.
