The Energy Department and Nuclear Waste Partnership on Thursday will host the next Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) town hall meeting in Carlsbad, N.M., only a week after the agency provided more details about which sites will be first to ship transuranic waste to the deep-underground disposal facility.
The webcast meeting is slated to begin at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time.
The Oak Ridge Site and Los Alamos National Laboratory would be the last of five sites to ship transuranic waste to WIPP in the next 11 months, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office and top-ranking agency official at WIPP, said last week at the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix.
WIPP, which reopened in late December after a nearly three-year pause in operations following an underground radiation release in 2014, will start accepting shipments from across the DOE complex in April. The first three facilities to ship will be: the privately owned Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas; DOE’s Idaho Site; and the Savannah River Site.
Also last week in Phoenix, Shrader said DOE has given up on salvaging what is left of WIPP’s Panel 4 disposal area after a cave-in there in November. Previously, the agency and its contractor had held out hope the football-field-sized room could be salvageable.
Items to watch for at the Thursday meeting include: updates on the agency’s progress in upgrading WIPP’s underground ventilation system.
Agency officials teased a possible update on social media Monday.
Subcontractors support test activities for a new ventilation shaft at WIPP. Go to @WIPPNews for more information.
— DOE WIPP (@WIPPNEWS) March 13, 2017
An entirely new ventilation system will cost $270 million to $400 million and come online no earlier than next decade, DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership estimate.
Also watch for WIPP officials to discuss their complex-wide efforts to deal with transuranic waste containing oxidizing chemicals that are potential fire-starters. WIPP’s strict new waste acceptance criteria, approved last summer, prohibits placing such chemicals underground at the mine. DOE’s National Transuranic Waste Program is helping waste generator sites across the complex deal with old transuranic waste shipments that might contain such chemicals.
