The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, coming out of a maintenance outage, received 23 shipments of transuranic waste during the last half of March, according to online data.
Because of the extended maintenance outage, which kept the underground salt mine offline all of February, shipment only resumed March 15. The outage factors into why the past month’s figures amounted to only two-thirds of the total for March 2023.
Thirteen of the March 2024 shipments came from Idaho National Laboratory, according to figures posted Thursday on the DOE webpage for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
Five shipments of defense-related transuranic waste originated from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, three from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and two from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The last March shipment recorded was March 28. There can be about a two-week lagtime before shipments appear on the website.
The monthly figure is down from 36 recorded during March 2023.
The 489 shipments during 2023 made it the best calendar year for WIPP since an underground radiation leak in February 2014 from a drum shipped from Los Alamos. WIPP was offline for about three years due to damage incurred from the accident. The prior post-accident best for WIPP was 311 shipments in 2018.
Before the accident WIPP would occasionally take in upwards of 700 shipments in a year’s time, according to the WIPP website. DOE and its prime, Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, say things are gradually rebounding.
The opening of Panel 8 around November 2022, which provided crews with a work area uncontaminated by the accident, and planned commissioning of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System later this year. The new system is meant to triple the underground airflow to the mine.
