The Department of Energy and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., held firm Thursday on a mid-December restart date for the nation’s only disposal facility for the contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
AECOM and BWXT-led contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) and DOE are on a path “to either meet or beat that date,” Jim Blankenhorn, the contractor’s recovery manager and deputy project manager, said in a WIPP town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad.
Blankenhorn spoke alongside Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, and Jeff Carswell, DOE’s nuclear safety senior technical adviser at the site. Carswell had the lion’s share of time at the meeting, presenting a massive new documented safety analysis (DSA) he helped shepherd to completion, which is key to establishing a new safety regime at WIPP to prevent accidents such as the February 2014 underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire that have kept the mine closed for more than two years.
That document was completed two months later than planned — DOE thought it would be ready in February but only gave final approval May 29 — and was a major choke point for beginning practice waste disposal, or cold operations, with non-nuclear containers at WIPP.
Cold operations began Wednesday and will continue for about eight weeks, Blankenhorn said at the town hall. However, these dry runs had been scheduled to start May 6, according to a document DOE Shrader briefed in February at a town hall. The retraining period would be followed by several reviews of WIPP operational readiness before DOE gives final authorization to resume operations.
Carswell, a DOE veteran with 12 years under his belt at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., said the WIPP schedule published in February was sort of a “best guess” at how long the home stretch of the restart would take.
But Blankenhorn was emphatic that NWP would be ready to reopen WIPP by Dec. 12. The exec said there was some margin in the restart schedule before the documented safety analysis — largely an NWP product — came in two months late, and that there was still some margin, which the contractor is “working hard to protect.”
As for the DSA itself, Carswell and Shrader were unambiguous in their belief that its rules, had they been in place in 2014, would have prevented the accidents that shuttered WIPP.
“I can say it’s not going to happen again.” Carswell said of the fire and the radiation leak. “We think that with all these controls that we put in place, this will not happen again.”
Meanwhile, DOE will provide an update on the cost of the recovery in a Carlsbad town hall meeting tentatively slated for early August, Shrader said.
In February, DOE estimated it would spend some $245 million on WIPP recovery over four years. That, however, is only the cost for mine repairs, accident investigation, and other activities such as the new WIPP DSA that would not have been necessary had the accidents never taken place. Over the same four years, DOE also spent an additional $1 billion to keep NWP on the job during the recovery — money that otherwise would have paid for normal waste emplacement and operations.
DOE’s recovery figure, according Shrader’s February charts, also does not include the roughly $110 million the agency planned to spend on ventilation upgrades between 2015 and 2017. Among other things, the money paid for the interim ventilation system that came online in April, and which is needed to restart underground waste disposal.
A permanent ventilation upgrade, which will free the agency to expand the mine while also placing waste shipments from DOE sites and performing routine maintenance that requires the use of diesel-fueled equipment, will cost $270 million to $400 million, and not be ready until 2021 at the earliest, a DOE official said during an industry conference in March.
Assuming the ventilation system rings in at the top of that range, the tally for the WIPP recovery from 2014 to 2021 — including the full NWP presence on-site during the two years WIPP has not accepted any new waste from across the DOE complex — would be roughly $1.7 billion, or about $240 million a year.
