The comment period on a draft environmental assessment (EA) for a planned above-ground storage facility at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., has been extended by two weeks, DOE said recently.
The original 30-day comment period, from Dec. 15 through Jan. 15, will now end Jan. 29, DOE said in a notice posted on the WIPP website. The notice did not cite a particular reason for the extension.
The Energy Department proposes to build a 65,280- cubic-foot concrete storage facility for contact-handled transuranic waste. The agency has said the surface facility would provide storage to accommodate maintenance-related outages in the WIPP underground, such as the one set for next week, and other schedule hiccups connected with TRU waste shipments from the DOE complex.
The facility would include capacity for up to 408 concrete waste overpack containers, enough to store as many as 136 shipments of TRU waste. Containers could be held in the above-ground storage facility for up to one year, the environmental document says.
The storage facility is expected to cost about $8 million. Construction is tentatively scheduled to start in 2021, Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, said recently. A construction staff of about 50 will be needed for the project, which should take roughly 18 months to complete, according to the draft EA.
Some surface storage already occurs at WIPP on a less-permanent basis at its Waste Handling Building. The draft environmental assessment is required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Comments can be emailed to [email protected]
WIPP is the nation’s only underground disposal site for TRU waste. After being offline for nearly three years following a February 2014 underground fire and radiation release, WIPP was authorized to resume operations in December 2016 and started receiving shipments of TRU waste again last April.
WIPP has also said it is also on the verge of slowly resuming underground salt mining at the site.
Since at least September 2017, WIPP officials have been cautiously watching for a rock fall in Room 6, Panel 7. The rock fall has yet to occur.
A Dec. 1 report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board indicated there is some concern at WIPP about “the adequacy of plans to maintain the stability” of a main access route for transport of waste to the disposal rooms in panels 7 and 8.
“The report is accurate,” NWP’s Mager said when asked about the DNFSB report. Rock falls are not rare underground, and WIPP has prohibited anyone from going into the area where a rock fall is anticipated.
“The ground movement in Room 6, Panel 7 has stabilized. A rock fall is not expected for 1 to 2 months. However, Room 6 has been prohibited from personnel entry for a year. Once geotechnical experts determine the fall is imminent, access to Panel 7 will be prohibited,” according to Mager.
Since reopening, WIPP had received 133 transports of transuranic waste as of Dec. 21, the last date for which data is publicly available.
The Idaho National Laboratory made nearly two-thirds, or 88, of the shipments. Under a 1995 settlement agreement with Idaho, DOE committed to taking all of its transuranic waste out of the state by Dec. 31, 2018.
Texas-based Waste Control Specialists was a very distant second at 18 shipments of waste that originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee recorded 17 shipments. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina moved nine shipments to WIPP and the Los Alamos National Laboratory made one shipment.
Most of the 2017 shipments, 95 of them, were received since Aug. 1, according to WIPP data.
Nuclear Waste Partnership President and Project Manager Bruce Covert said during a WIPP Town Hall meeting in September that the site is expected to receive about 258 shipments between August 2017 and August 2018.
