PHOENIX — The first three sites to ship transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico will be privately operated Waste Control Specialists of Andrews, Texas, and the Department of Energy’s Idaho and Savannah River sites, a senior DOE official said here Monday.
The department has not yet decided which of those three will go first, but all are ahead of the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Todd Shrader, head of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said in a panel discussion at the annual Waste Management Symposium.
“The first group will be WCS [Waste Control Specialists] in Texas, Idaho, Savannah River will be the first couple months of shipments,” Shrader said. “Then, eventually, we’ll move on to Oak Ridge and then Los Alamos will be the next.”
All five of these facilities were on a shipping shortlist DOE released late last month. At the time, the agency declined to say which site, or even group of sites, would be first to ship transuranic waste to the WIPP. The department is targeting a total of about 130 shipments of waste to WIPP from these five sites from April to January — good for a shipping rate of two to three a week, Shrader said.
The department currently buries two shipments of waste at WIPP each week. It takes about six hours to place each one safely in the deep underground salt mine, Shrader said. All of the shipments that have gone underground since the mine’s Jan. 4 reopening were left above ground at the site’s Waste Handling Building following the 2014 underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated mine fire.
Since resuming waste emplacement in early January, DOE has emptied the Waste Handling Building of all waste containers except those containing oxidizing chemicals — those which, when combined with a heat source and fuel to burn, could start a fire.
The agency’s National Transuranic Waste Management Program is still working out how to certify for disposal those waste containers packed with oxidizing chemicals. That includes containers at WIPP, as well as containers across the country that have yet to ship, program director J.R. Stroble said at Monday’s panel.
It was not clear exactly how much waste that would leave in the above-ground Waste Handling Building, and DOE did not reply this week to requests for an exact count.
DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership would have buried about 54 cubic meters of packaged waste at WIPP since Jan. 4, assuming they stuck to their schedule of interring two shipments a week over the past nine weeks. That would fill up about half a tractor trailer.
Stroble’s office has nearly finished a document called a “basis of knowledge” that will inform the agency’s ultimate requirements for shipping oxidizer-container waste to WIPP. As far as the schedule for certifying such potentially dangerous waste for burial, “we’ll know more probably in the coming months as we implement those requirements,” Stroble said in a question-and-answer session after Monday’s panel.
Still, there is plenty of transuranic waste across the complex without oxidizing chemicals that probably can ship to WIPP already, Stroble said. With that in mind, Shrader said DOE is already contemplating a more rapid waste-disposal schedule at the storage site.
“We hope to eventually move that up to three emplacements a week later this summer and then some time later this year, or early next year, perhaps four,” Shrader said during the panel. “We’re looking at some process improvements that, a ways out, might get us to five or higher.”
Ideally, Shrader said, WIPP would have 42 waste-shipping weeks per year. Maintenance downtime and planned infrastructure improvements such as a new waste hoist will make it impossible to accept and dispose of waste every week of the year, he said.
Meanwhile, a key figure in the WIPP recovery has has officially left Nuclear Waste Partnership. Jim Blankenhorn, the company’s WIPP recovery manager since 2014, left his post the week of Feb. 27, Shrader told the audience here.
After the panel, Blankenhorn, an employee of Nuclear Waste Partnership parent AECOM, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing he had returned to his employer to mull his next move. While there is plenty of nuclear cleanup work set to get under contract both in the United States and abroad, Blankenhorn told Weapons Complex Monitor he would “prefer to stay in the U.S.”
