With WIPP again receiving shipments, new ventilation system nearly ready

The Department of Energy has targeted disposal 425 shipments of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico during fiscal 2025, and so far, there have been 151, a DOE official said Wednesday night.

Mindy Toothman, the site operations and infrastructure division director for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, cited the numbers during a regular public briefing on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). While the formal slide presentation only listed 104, Toothman said she checked the latest numbers that morning and it was up to 151.

The fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is more than half over. 

WIPP recently resumed underground waste disposal and wound down a maintenance outage that started in January. There were 13 shipments received at the underground salt mine in March.

Toothman and Rick Chavez, environmental program manager for the Bechtel-led WIPP prime Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, said the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) should come online late this summer.

A 90-day operational test run, a two-phase management self-assessment have both been completed as has a contractor readiness review the DOE and contractor managers told the WIPP public meeting.

The DOE Office of Environmental Management has approved an exemption allowing critical decision 4 to go forward.

The DOE officials at Wednesday’s public meeting could not immediately provide the current price tag for the new ventilation system. Prior estimates have placed the project cost at about $494 million.

The system, expected to triple underground airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute, is expected to enable simultaneous waste emplacement, salt mining and maintenance underground. The prior WIPP ventilation system was damaged in a February 2014 underground radiation leak resulting from a waste drum that overheated and ruptured.