The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 28 shipments of transuranic waste during May, according to its website.
Twenty shipments during the month came from the Idaho National Laboratory, four from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, three from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and one from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The monthly total is down from the 47 shipments taken in at the underground salt mine during April, but more than double the 12 received at the disposal site in May 2022.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has tallied 174 shipments during the first five months of 2023, or more than double the 67 recorded from January through May of 2022. So far in fiscal 2023, which started Oct. 1, WIPP has received 272 shipments. That’s more than double the 128 shipments received during the first eight months of fiscal 2022.
The numbers indicate WIPP continues to trend toward its busiest year since reopening for waste disposal in 2017 following a February 2014 shutdown triggered by an underground fire and radiation leak.
Since WIPP’s reopening, the best performance was 311 in 2018.
Disposal efforts at WIPP closed a noteworthy chapter in the past month, when DOE and its prime contractor told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board that Underground Hazardous Waste Disposal Unit, Panel 7 has been closed as certified by an independent New Mexico registered professional engineer.
Until last fall, WIPP had been disposing of waste in Panel 7, an area contaminated by the events of 2014. Workers began disposing waste in the freshly-mined Panel 8 in November 2022. Closure of Panel 7’s air intake and exhaust passageways, “known as drifts, included a steel bulkhead, 100 feet of floor to ceiling run-of-mine salt and then another steel bulkhead,” a WIPP spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
DOE and its prime contractor, Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Contractors, hope to consistently hit 17 shipments per week, which would amount to about 680 per year assuming 40 weeks of operation per year.
The head of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office that oversees WIPP said recently a new ventilation system, which should triple underground airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute, is 83% complete and could startup by the end of 2024.
