While it has been looking since the fourth quarter of 2017, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has not yet hired a director of mining.
Nuclear Waste Partnership still hopes to find the right candidate in the near future, spokesman Donavan Mager said by telephone last week. Making the right selection is more important than filling the post quickly, he added. Officials at the transuranic waste disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M., said in November they planned to have a mining director in place in early 2018. The mining chief would, among other things, oversee safety in the salt removal operation.
Nuclear Waste Partnership identified hiring a chief mining officer as a priority last September when it received a three-year, $928 million extension to its DOE contract. The base five-year deal NWP signed in April 2012 was worth $1.3 billion.
Since it resumed underground salt mining operations in January to clear out more waste disposal space, NWP has removed 8,700 tons of salt at WIPP, Mager said in a subsequent email on Friday. Completions of salt mining in Panel 8 is scheduled for 2020, before waste emplacement is finished in Panel 7.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Anne Marie White recently approved a new $288 million ventilation system for WIPP. The new system has been called crucial to resuming full waste disposal and salt mining operations because current airflow levels are not sufficient to support both operations simultaneously.
WIPP was offline for about three years following a February 2014 underground radiation release. Operations have resumed on a slow, incremental basis, DOE officials have said.
