With limited room at WIPP, feds urged to study expansion

Changes could lead to facility accepting more dangerous, high-level radioactive waste

At 52 percent of capacity, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad will be filled up before all of the transuranic waste intended for permanent disposal at the site can be buried there.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday outlines the need for the U.S. Energy Department to study regulatory steps and financial costs associated with expanding WIPP. But this expansion could also pave the way for WIPP in the future to accept more dangerous, high-level nuclear waste, which is currently prohibited by law.

The report says WIPP, the only permanent disposal site for any form of nuclear waste, does not have enough space for all of the transuranic waste — tools, clothes, soil and other material contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements — generated to date by the Energy Department’s defense missions.

WIPP is expected to be full by 2026, and the report estimates at least 25,939 cubic meters of waste intended for WIPP will have no place to go unless its underground salt-bed mines in southeastern New Mexico are expanded.

The GAO recommends the Energy Department estimate future volumes of transuranic waste that will be generated beyond WIPP’s scheduled closure in 2050, and develop a timeline for how long it would take to go through regulatory processes required to add new space. Expansion would require approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New Mexico Environment Department, the public and Congress.

The recommendation could have broad implications, not only for the physical expansion of WIPP but legal changes that could allow the facility to accept significantly more dangerous nuclear waste.

Since the spring of 2016, the Energy Department has been looking at WIPP as a potential burial site for 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium sitting at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This weapons-grade material is included in a deal reached between the U.S. and Russia in 2000, when both countries agreed to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium by turning it into fuel. This quantity of plutonium is enough to build 17,000 nuclear weapons, according to the GAO report.

The U.S. originally said it would dispose of the plutonium by building a mixed-oxide processing facility in South Carolina, referred to as MOX. But the cost of that project has grown by $17 billion, and the Energy Department said it would be more cost-effective to pursue a “dilute and dispose” option, which entails mixing the plutonium with an inert material at Los Alamos National Laboratory and disposing of it at WIPP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the U.S. for pursuing this path, saying it was failing to live up to its part of the bargain, while Russia had complied.

During a teleconference in May, Frank Klotz, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said, “Our assumption now has been that WIPP is a natural place in which to dispose of plutonium.”

He said several metric tons of plutonium are already at WIPP, shipped there after it was “down blended” with inert material as a result of cleanup associated with the closure of the Rocky Flats Plant, a nuclear facility in Colorado that shut down in the early 1990s.

Since “we reopened WIPP a few months ago, we have already had a shipment of plutonium at Savannah River shipped and already in place at WIPP,” he said. Klotz said this storage of “down blended” plutonium did not violate WIPP’s current waste acceptance policy.

The GAO said the idea of diluting and disposing of 34 metric tons of plutonium at WIPP raises questions about what regulatory and security changes would be necessary.

Under the 1992 Land Withdrawal Act, WIPP can only accept 175,565 cubic meters of transuranic waste, and it is prohibited from taking high-level defense or nuclear reactor waste. After WIPP’s scheduled closing in 2050, the salt mines, 2,000 feet below ground, are expected to slowly collapse and seal in the waste.

Expanding WIPP’s capacity is further complicated by recent incidents. WIPP shut down for nearly three years, only reopening in January, after two hazardous incidents. In the first, a truck caught fire in the underground caverns and caused evacuations. Then a waste drum burst and released radiation, significantly compromising the ventilation systems and exposing a number of workers to a low dose of radiation.

Since WIPP reopened, it has operated under tightened waste acceptance criteria, specifically surrounding materials with the potential to explode, and has been burying waste at a significantly slower rate than before the 2014 incidents, in part because of a still-compromised ventilation system.

But despite WIPP’s issues, the United States has few places to put its vast stores of nuclear waste. Between the large quantities of defense waste that sit at Energy Department sites and the waste generated by commercial nuclear reactors, there is an ever-growing surplus of waste that has no safe, permanent place for disposal.

The Energy Department has looked into the possibility of deep underground boreholes and considered two sites in New Mexico for that purpose. The Trump administration defunded that project, however, and instead designated funds to recertify Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which was proposed for permanent high-level waste disposal by Congress in the late ’80s, when WIPP was designated for low-level waste. But the Yucca Mountain project was defunded during the Obama Administration in the face of strong political pushback and fears that facility was scientifically unsound. Proposals also have been underway to get regulatory approval for temporary high-level waste storage sites in New Mexico and Texas.

The National Nuclear Security Administration had not yet assessed the total costs associated with expanding WIPP, the GAO report states, but $9 million was requested in the Energy Department’s budget for fiscal year 2018 to begin pursuit of dilute-and-dispose options.

Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center, said the GAO report is “not a final decision by any stretch of the imagination.”

“In the late ’80s and early ’90s, literally thousands of people in New Mexico participated in congressional hearings around what became the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act,” Hancock said. “The bad news is that people are probably going to have to get involved again.”

Contact Rebecca Moss at 505-986-3011.