WIPP could reopen this year

Valentine’s Day marks two years since a radiation leak shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, putting the brakes on the nation’s cleanup of certain types of defense nuclear waste.

The one-of-a-kind, deep underground nuclear waste repository outside Carlsbad has spent the past 24 months and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out what happened and clean up the facility enough to restart operations.

We now know more or less what happened: Los Alamos National Laboratory packed transuranic waste including nitrate salts, a byproduct of nuclear weapons production, in drums with an absorbent organic cat litter — a volatile combination that caused a reaction hot enough to blow the lid on a drum that had been placed underground at WIPP.

So when will WIPP reopen?

That depends on whom you ask.

The Department of Energy and its WIPP contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, say 2016 is the year.

This month, The Department of Energy plans to roll out a new schedule for restarting some waste emplacement and new estimates for what the recovery will cost. Previous estimates pegged it at $500 million, but that number is now expected to run higher.

Todd Shrader, the Energy Department’s Carlsbad Field Office manager, told a recent town hall meeting that operating plans known as the “performance measurement baseline” support a restart of waste emplacement in late 2016 “at an 80 percent confidence level.”

The New Mexico Environment Department also is “cautiously optimistic” that operations could restart this year. But the Environment Department says the Department of Energy must first meet the requirements of the state’s compliance orders issued in the aftermath of the radiation release and an unrelated underground fire that also occurred in February 2014.

“At this point, we are cautiously optimistic that they are going to be able to achieve all these requirements and that NMED will conduct its inspection before the end of the calendar year,” said Kathryn Roberts, director of the Environment Department’s Resource Protection Division.

The Energy Department needs to modify its permits with the New Mexico Environment Department to operate a now-contaminated facility, including changes related to a contingency plan and to new emergency equipment and training requirements.

There is some debate about whether the permit modifications require public discussion and review — a process that could take months or years and delay the Department of Energy’s plans to open WIPP’s doors this year.

Don Hancock, a vocal WIPP watchdog with the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, says WIPP is now storing waste that was never permitted to go underground: drums packed with a potentially unstable mix of ingredients from LANL.

He says the state needs to write additional audit and surveillance requirements into the permit so that mistakes like the ones that led to the LANL drum erupting underground don’t happen again.

“I think there are significant changes needed,” Hancock told me. “One of the obvious ones is the permit currently says that any ignitable or corrosive waste is prohibited and we now know that not only the one container from LANL that had the chemical reaction but 675 other containers have ignitable ingredients. What happens to these other 675 containers that could go ‘boom’ in the underground? Those are in violation of the permit.”

Asked whether WIPP needs a permit modification for the problem waste already underground, Roberts said, “We’re evaluating that.”

“But I think that has been accomplished through our enforcement actions,” she said. “I don’t think there will be need for a permit modification. The administrative orders require that WIPP do an interim closure of the waste where it is housed, and that has been completed.”

The Nuclear Waste Partnership has sealed up Panel 6 and Room 7 of Panel 7 — the areas where other potentially problem drums that came from LANL are disposed.

There are a few other important steps that need to be completed.

WIPP has had severely restricted airflow underground since the radiation release contaminated a key exhaust shaft, and the air underground must be filtered. An interim ventilation system needs to be installed and tested to ensure there is enough good air for workers underground.

Additionally, accident investigators identified dozens of corrective actions needed before WIPP can reopen. The Nuclear Waste Partnership and the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office say they are close to completing the to-do list; they have checked off 200 of the 241 corrective actions required.

Sometime soon, the Nuclear Waste Partnership plans to start “cold operations” in which workers will practice handling mock waste containers underground “using new equipment and procedures to help ensure all activities can be done safely before actual operations begin,” the Carlsbad Field Office said in a statement.

Sites around the country with stockpiles of defense nuclear waste are waiting.