The Department of Energy prime for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has hired a mine company to refurbish a large underground salt bin this year.
Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, which runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for DOE, has retained Cementation, a mine development company with offices in Utah and Canada, to rebuild what the agency calls the “salt pocket,” DOE said in a Tuesday news release.
The release did not disclose the value of the contract, but said work should start this summer and be completed this year. Cementation’s website said it engineers and develops mine projects for clients around the world.
The steel-framed pocket is 55 feet below the salt hoist station in the WIPP underground. The salt pocket holds mined salt before it is raised to the surface by an eight-ton skip, which is a metal box with a bottom door for dumping, according to DOE. At the surface the salt is dumped into haul trucks and taken to WIPP stockpiles.
The salt pocket is separate from the new Utility Shaft project being built at WIPP, a DOE spokesperson said earlier this year.
The existing salt pocket has been in service for 25 years and is due for refurbishment, DOE said. The agency said in the release this is partly due to the steel being under pressure from the natural underground shifting of salt by a few inches annually.
The subcontractor Cementation will be responsible for dismantling the existing loading pocket and its structural steel, re-mining and supporting the ground, and building a new salt loading pocket, according to the release. DOE can temporarily stockpile salt underground in WIPP passageways but prefers to move it to the surface immediately, according to the release.
In a report dated March 1, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said the WIPP prime has funds to “begin structural repairs for the salt pocket” and planning was underway.
“The salt pocket is critical to our continued success as we safely dispose of the nation’s defense-related transuranic waste,” DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office manager Mark Bollinger said in the Tuesday release.