The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 20 shipments during May, equal to the throughput of May 2020, when operations scaled back due to COVID-19, and about half of the 42 logged during the pre-virus days of May 2019.
The figures are from DOE’s public website for shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the defense-related transuranic waste site run by Nuclear Waste Partnership, a team of Amentum and BWX Technologies with Orano as a key subcontractor.
During the first five months of 2019, WIPP received 125 shipments. During 2020 the figure was 67 for the same five-month period. During 2021, there have been 70 for the same stretch.
Of the 2021 WIPP shipments, 42 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 23 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, four from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and one from Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
There are still 74 containers, holding 262 inner drums of transuranic material from Los Alamos, stored at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas and the stranded waste will likely remain into fiscal 2022, which starts Oct. 1, according to the White House budget request justification. Some require treatment before being sent onto WIPP to ensure the drums are not at risk of rupturing, as happened in 2014 when a Los Alamos drum leaked radiation into WIPP’s underground, idling the disposal complex for about three years.
There were originally more than 300 containers of the Los Alamos waste, rerouted to Waste Control Specialists rather than WIPP, in 2014. Most have been deemed safe and sent onto WIPP. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has been pushing DOE since late 2019 to prioritize removal of the remaining containers from Texas.
