The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., has completed an annual maintenance outage that started in January, while managers plan an even longer one next year.
The outage that ran from Jan. 5 through March 13 is finished and the underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste is once again accepting shipments from around the weapons complex, according to DOE’s press release.
DOE and crews from Bechtel-led prime. Salado Isolation Mining Contractors carried out 145 critical work activities, including 112 preventive maintenance items and 31 corrective actions, according to the press release.
In one of the biggest projects during this year’s outage, crews replaced the core of the waste hoist motor, located five-stories high inside the waste hoist tower, DOE said in the release. The motor controls a half-dozen “head ropes” and three “tail ropes” and a 53-ton counterweight, all vital to moving people, waste and material more than 2,100-feet underground. The hoist can carry up to 75 workers and 45 tons of waste or equipment.
But the hoist is old, installed in the early 1980s. Mark Bollinger, manager of the DOE Carlsbad Field Office., said last week in Phoenix that WIPP would go offline early in 2027 to replace aging steel for the hoist. That outage, likely to start in January, could last six months.
During the Waste Management Symposia last week in Phoenix, Bollinger said WIPP will launch an outage of perhaps six months to replace all underground steel supporting waste hoists,
The planned long shutdown “is because we have to take the waist hoist out of service to redo all the steel,” Bollinger said. Citing the environment inside the deep salt mine, Bollinger said “mother nature” has taken a toll on the hoist’s steel over the decades. The facility is more than 40 years old, he added.
“We have mined around it to keep it going as long as we can but at some point, you have to take a hit,” Bollinger said. The hit might run six months, he added.
On another topic, Bollinger said “we still focus very much on LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] and making sure that all the waste that is ready to come down from LANL gets down as quickly as possible.”
While Bollinger did not mention it directly, New Mexico officials continue to pressure DOE to increase the rate of legacy waste shipments from Los Alamos.
“We have a couple of big, difficult waste streams at Idaho to work through,” Bollinger said. Bollinger said WIPP is gradually getting closer to receiving the vast majority of the legacy waste inventories from Argonne in Illinois and Savannah River in South Carolina.