The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., received 311 shipments of defense transuranic waste during 2018.
May was the busiest month of the year, with 37 shipments. January, with two federal holidays and a two-week maintenance outage, was the slowest month in 2018 with only 14 shipments, according to a monthly summary from WIPP’s online database.
The disposal facility averaged 25.9 shipments per month and just shy of six shipments per week for the 52-week calendar year. (The Energy Department calculates its weekly shipment rate based on 42 weeks of receiving waste, which excludes holidays, weather-related delays, and a maintenance outage).
The Idaho National Laboratory was far and away the top shipper, with 243 in 2018. That was followed by 47 shipments from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, 13 from Waste Control Specialists in Texas, five from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, two from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and one from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
WIPP was closed for nearly three years after a February 2014 radiation release, and 2018 marked its first full year since reopening of receiving TRU waste shipments. It resumed taking shipments of waste from DOE generating sites in April 2017 and received 133 by the end of the year. The Energy Department projects roughly 400 shipments for 2019.
By comparison, WIPP took in 724 shipments in 2013, its last full year or operation prior to the accident. 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 in fall 2021.
Approximately 97 percent of the anticipated contact-handled TRU waste expected to eventually find its way to WIPP will come from large quantity sites such as Hanford, Idaho, LANL, Oak Ridge and SRS, according to DOE’s recently released Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report for 2018. Likewise, about 95 percent of the more radioactive remote-handled TRU waste is expected to come from these sites.
