The Energy Department’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, Nuclear Waste Partnership, is likely to award a contract for construction of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System in May.
That should be followed shortly afterward by a groundbreaking, with project completion expected in 2021, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said during a WIPP Town Hall meeting Thursday.
The Energy Department earlier this spring issued a request for proposals and received three bids for the project, which is intended to improve safety and airflow, and allow full transuranic waste disposal rates in the underground facility.
The ventilation project will cost roughly $273 million, according to a DOE estimate. Nuclear Waste Partnership will manage the ventilation contractor directly. One early part of the project, construction of a new filter building, should start this August.
Following a February 2014 underground radiation release, WIPP cut airflow levels drastically to prevent the spread of contaminants. Increasing airflow was a key part of the site’s nearly three-year recovery. Emplacement of on-site transuranic waste resumed in January 2017. WIPP again started taking off-site shipments in April 2017.
The Carlsbad Field Office and NWP are also working to address concerns raised about the ventilation system in a March 26 letter from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The DNFSB said the final design document for ventilation doesn’t include the underground continuous air monitoring (CAM) system. The monitors could detect an underground radiological release, according to the DNFSB letter. But DOE has indicated the CAMs are not part of the ventilation project, and documentation about the CAMs will be provided later.
For record-keeping purposes, DOE has largely defined this stage of the ventilation capital project as facilities that will largely be constructed on the surface, Shrader said.
“It does not mean that we don’t think they’re important, they are,” Shrader said of the continuous air monitors. The agency is working with DNFSB to resolve the board’s concerns, he added.
The Energy Department responded by letter to the DNFSB concerns on March 29, a spokesperson said earlier Thursday.
