The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico received 61 shipments of transuranic (TRU) waste during September, marking its highest monthly total for the 2025 fiscal year and the calendar year thus far.
Last month’s total is six more than the 55 shipments of TRU waste sent in August, and the most since 59 shipments were received at WIPP in June.
Of the 61 shipments in September, 30 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, according to WIPP’s public receipt database. Another 20 came from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, about 350 miles north of Carlsbad, N.M. where WIPP is located.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina sent nine shipments and a single shipment each came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, about 25 miles outside of Chicago.
The partial federal government shutdown started on Oct. 1 and it remains to be seen how that will affect October shipments.
WIPP, managed for DOE by Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, is the nation’s only repository for defense-related TRU waste, material contaminated with radioactive elements during nuclear missions. It typically includes protective clothing, tools, rags, equipment, and assorted items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium.
For fiscal 2025, which ran from Oct. 1, 2024 through Sept. 30, 2025, WIPP received 432 shipments, with 294 of them coming from Idaho. By comparison, the facility received 490 shipments in fiscal year 2024.
For WIPP, fiscal 2025 included a planned, two-month outage at the top of the calendar year that temporarily suspended the receipt of TRU waste. The facility received its first shipments of 2025 in March.
In addition, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Mark Bollinger has said previously much of the already packaged, certified and ready-to-ship waste around the nuclear complex has already been sent to WIPP. While plenty of transuranic waste remains, much of it requires significant preparation before it’s ready to be hauled to the underground disposal site in the New Mexico desert, according to DOE.