The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received at least 29 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste during October, according to a public website for the facility.
As of Thursday morning, the website, which typically trails actual shipments by about two weeks, listed the last shipment during the month occurring on Oct. 28.
That is a lot more than the 17 shipments received at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in October 2021.
Last month there were eight shipments from Idaho National Laboratory, 10 from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; five from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; three from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and three from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
For the first 10 months of 2022, WIPP has received 203 shipments. By contrast, the underground disposal site took in only 166 shipments during the first 10 months of 2021, according to the website.
WIPP management recently announced the start of waste disposal in the new Panel 8, where workers no longer must wear so much personal protective equipment. The extra gear was needed in Panel 7, left contaminated by a February 2014 underground radiation leak that effectively stopped waste disposal for about three years.
The agency and prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, an Amentum-BWXT team, hope the new uncontaminated panel, together with infrastructure projects such as a new ventilation system meant to triple underground airflow by 2025, should bring WIPP back to its pre-accident levels of around 700 shipments annually.
The facility has only topped 300 shipments once per year since reopening in 2017. In February, Nuclear Waste Partnership will turn over the WIPP reins to a new operations contractor, a Bechtel affiliate called Tularosa Basin Range Services doing business as Salado Isolation Mining Contractors.
