PHOENIX – Crews at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico are ending one maintenance outage while planning a longer one for 2027 officials said during the Waste Management Symposia last week.
In January 2027, Bechtel-led prime Salado Isolation Mining Contractors will be launching an outage of perhaps six months to replace all underground steel supporting waste hoists, said Mark Bollinger, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office. Bollinger made the comment during a Thursday March 12 roundtable discussion on waste management in the DOE weapons complex.
Also during the conference, WIPP officials said they expect to resume transuranic waste shipments this week, marking the end of a maintenance outage that started in mid-January.
The planned long shutdown “is because we have to take the waist hoist out of service to redo all the steel,” Bollinger said. Citing the environment inside the deep salt mine, Bollinger said “mother nature” has taken a toll on the hoist’s steel over the decades. The facility is more than 40 years old, he added.
“We have mined around it to keep it going as long as we can but at some point, you have to take a hit,” Bollinger said. The hit might run six months, he added.
On another topic, Bollinger said “we still focus very much on LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] and making sure that all the waste that is ready to come down from LANL gets down as quickly as possible.”
While Bollinger did not mention it directly, New Mexico officials continue to pressure DOE to increase the rate of legacy waste shipments from Los Alamos.