The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received fewer shipments of defense-related transuranic waste during 2024 than in 2023, a decline that bosses at the underground disposal site hinted at during the fall.
With annual results counted, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) finished 2024 with 470 shipments down from 489 in 2023, according to DOE’s public website for WIPP.
During the month of December, WIPP received 29 shipments, compared with 48 for December of 2023, a difference of 19 that would account for the 2024 gap.
A WIPP shipping route in New Mexico was also damaged by flooding in the state. Shipments along the route resumed in November, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
A drop-off in traffic was predicted during a public meeting in October by managers for DOE and its WIPP prime, Salado Isolation Mining Contractors.
Mark Bollinger, DOE’s manager for the Carlsbad Field Office, said WIPP is working its way through the transuranic waste that is already certified, packaged and ready for transport to the salt mine. Much of what is left is “more difficult,” Bollinger said, pointing to the Hanford Site in Washington state, where there is lots of transuranic waste buried in shallow ground.
2023 was WIPP’s busiest waste disposal year since a February 2014 underground radiation leak, caused by a ruptured drum, which irradiated part of the WIPP underground and halted disposal operations for three years. Prior to 2014, WIPP disposed of 700 or more shipments in some years.
The Idaho National Laboratory accounted for 20 of last month’s shipments, according to DOE’s public website for WIPP. Four were shipped from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, four from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and one from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
Transuranic waste, a legal descriptor, is found in tools, rags, clothing, sludge and other items contaminated with radioactive elements heavier than uranium, often plutonium. It has a half-life of more than 20 years.
