The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received its first shipment of defense transuranic waste 20 years ago this week.
The Energy Department, WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, and officials in southeastern New Mexico plan various activities in March and April to mark the 20th anniversary of the inaugural shipment, which arrived March 26, 1999, from the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory further north in the state.
The underground salt mine has to date received about 12,390 shipments of TRU waste, generally radioactively contaminated rags, soils, equipment, and sludge, from Cold War and Manhattan Project sites. The material has arrived from 22 different sites, according to NWP.
“Our drivers have travelled more than 14 million safe miles without a major incident,” vendor spokesman Donavan Mager said in a Wednesday email.
There was no 15th anniversary celebration due to a February 2014 underground radiation release that forced the facility out of operation for about three years. It resumed taking shipments from DOE sites in April 2017 and received 133 by the end of that year.
In 2018, WIPP received 311 shipments, with 243 coming from the Idaho National Laboratory. This year, WIPP had received 43 shipments as of March 8, the latest date for which data is publicly available.
By comparison, in 2013, its last full year or operation prior to the accident, WIPP took in 724 shipments. Energy Department Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader does not expect anything close to those numbers before a new underground ventilation system goes into operation, which DOE anticipates by November 2022.
Returning the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to full-scale emplacement is a priority, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Tuesday during an appearance before the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development. Perry was discussing the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget plan, which trims WIPP funding from $403 million in fiscal 2019 to $398 million for the budget year starting Oct. 1.
Completing a new underground ventilation system and taking advantage of a new accounting method for recording the volume of waste deposited in the salt mine are key to WIPP meeting its potential, Perry said.
The first move should prevent the facility from prematurely hitting its transuranic waste limit, supporters say, while the second should enable simultaneous underground waste emplacement and salt mining to create additional space for waste shipments.
Two advocacy groups in the state have filed a legal challenge to the revised state WIPP waste permit that authorized the accounting change, approved in December by the New Mexico Environment Department. The change specified that under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act waste volume no longer needs to be recorded by the outermost container.
In other words, a 5-gallon container of waste inside a larger 55-gallon drum no longer is counted as 55 gallons, Perry told the committee. While there is some “pushback” to the change, the energy secretary said the agency would try to address stakeholder concerns.
The record-keeping change reduces WIPP volume from roughly half full to one-third full of the maximum of 176,000 cubic meters of defense-related TRU allowed by the Land Withdrawal Act.
The WIPP prime contractor and DOE in November issued a $135 million subcontract to build the new ventilation system at the underground disposal facility to increase underground airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute, about triple the current airflow rate.
