WIPP CLEANUP COST COULD RIVAL THREE MILE ISLAND
Long-term cost of accident that shut nuclear waste storage site could top $2 billion
When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.
The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste.
But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. The long-term cost of the accident could top $2 billion, an amount in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
The Feb. 14, 2014, incident also is complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the United States. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that was headed for the dump is backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews.
Washington state officials recently were forced to accept delays in moving the equivalent of 24,000 drums of nuclear waste from their Hanford site to WIPP. The deal has further antagonized the relationship between federal regulators and states that want nuclear waste removed and transported to WIPP.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was designed to place waste from nuclear weapons production since World War II into prehistoric salt beds, which engineers say will collapse around the waste and permanently seal it.
The equivalent of 277,000 drums of radioactive waste is headed to the dump, according to federal documents.
The dump was dug much like a conventional mine, with vertical shafts and a maze of horizontal drifts. It had operated problemfree for 15 years and was touted by the Energy Department as a major success until the explosion, which involved a drum of plutonium and americium waste that had been packaged at Los
Alamos National Laboratory.
The problem was traced to cat litter used to blot up liquids in sealed drums. Lab officials had decided to substitute an organic material for a mineral one. But the new material caused a complex chemical reaction that blew the lid off a drum, sending mounds of white, radioactive foam into the air and contaminating 35 percent of the underground area.
Though the error at the Los Alamos lab caused the explosion, a federal investigation found more than two dozen safety lapses at the dump. The dump’s filtration system was supposed to prevent any radioactive releases, but it malfunctioned.
Twenty-one workers on the surface received low doses of radiation that federal officials said were well within safety limits. No workers were in the mine when the drum blew.
Federal officials have set an ambitious goal to reopen the site for at least limited waste processing by the end of this year, but full operations cannot resume until a new ventilation system is completed in about 2021.
The direct cost of the cleanup is now $640 million, based on a contract modification made last month with Nuclear Waste Partnership, which operates WIPP, that increased the cost from $1.3 billion to nearly $2 billion.
The cost-plus contract leaves open the possibility of even higher costs as repairs continue. And it does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned.
An Energy Department spokeswoman declined to address the cost issue but acknowledged that the dump would either have to stay open longer or find a way to handle more waste each year to make up for the shutdown. She said the contract modification gave the government the option to cut short the agreement with Nuclear Waste Partnership.
It costs about $200 million a year to operate the dump, so keeping it open an additional seven years could cost $1.4 billion. A top scientific expert on the dump concurred with that assessment.
The cleanup of the Three Mile Island plant took 12 years and was estimated to cost $1 billion by 1993, or $1.7billion adjusted for inflation today. The estimate did not include the cost of replacing the power the plant was no longer generating.