As of early December, the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., had received 200 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste in 2021, beating the 2020 total of 192 shipments with weeks left to go in the calendar year, according to the mine’s website.
In November alone, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) received 27 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste, according to the site, well above the 15 recorded during November 2020 in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sixteen of the 27 shipments last month came from the Idaho National Laboratory while the other 11 were split between the Los Alamos National Laboratory (9) in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site (2) in South Carolina. Shipments are recorded on the DOE WIPP website about two weeks after they arrive.
The manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, Reinhard Knerr, said recently the agency is targeting 400 shipments for WIPP during fiscal 2022, which started Oct. 1.
The DOE expects construction of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System will be complete sometime between 2024 and 2026. That project is expected to provide enough underground airflow to allow simultaneous salt mining, waste disposal and maintenance — something that has not been possible since an underground equipment fire and radiation leak in 2014, which halted disposal operations for about three years.
