A Department of Energy effort to reduce harmful underground emissions at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico will be slowed down pending a fire-hazard analysis of three new lithium-ion-battery-operated haul trucks, a government safety watchdog said in a recent update.
Nuclear Waste Partnership, the DOE’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), is gradually replacing diesel-operated vehicles with battery-operated vehicles, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said in a monthly report dated June 3.
But the WIPP prime “has not completed a fire hazard analysis involving these types of batteries,” according to the report.
So, the Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership has “placed these vehicles in the parking lot outside the WIPP perimeter security fence and is planning to send them back to the manufacturer until the hazard analysis is completed,” according to the DNFSB report.
The contractor and WIPP are seeking to reduce nitrogen-dioxide in the underground, DNFSB said in the staff report.
A January 2019 report from the DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments pointed to heat issues and underground air quality problems posed for workers who inhale diesel exhaust fumes underground.
DOE’s $463-million 2023 budget request for WIPP calls for the disposal site to continue “modernizing underground equipment to zero-emission battery-electric vehicles or, where full electrification is not currently feasible, very low emission Tier IV Final diesel powered equipment as a transitional step.”
WIPP received its first battery-powered electric vehicles in mid-2019.
