By Kennedy Maize
The U.S. Department of Energy has won a green light from the Environmental Protection Agency for construction of new space for nuclear waste storage at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico. WIPP is the government’s site for burying transuranic waste from the agency’s nuclear weapons program.
WIPP began operations in 1999. The current DOE contractor operating the project is Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, LLC (SIMCO), which Bechtel created to manage the project.
The need for additional space for storage began in February 2014 when two accidents severely damaged the underground operations. First, a truck caught on fire underground and the soot disabled critical equipment including the air monitoring system. Next, within days, an explosion in a 55-gallon drum storing waste exploded, spreading radiation widely.
The explosion occurred because workers used an organic absorbent – a wheat-based kitty litter – mixed with the waste to prevent water. They should have used an inorganic absorbent, clay kitty litter. A summary of the resulting explosion commented, “The unthinkable had happened; the wrong kind of kitty litter had caused a nuclear disaster.”
WIPP shut down for more than two years. In that time, a backlog of waste piled up.
Most of the WIPP waste consists of contaminated material such as gloves, tools, rags, and assorted machinery often found in the production of nuclear fuel and weapons.
Since the government’s program to convert surplus weapons plutonium into “mixed oxide” (MOX) reactor fuel at the Savannah River site in South Carolina died in the first Trump administration, WIPP has also been the storage site for plutonium mixed with large amounts of inert material to reduce its radiation to low levels. That has become known, sometimes derisively, as the “dilute and dispose” policy.
WIPP consists of “panels” — a series of rooms — carved into a thick natural salt bed near Carlsbad, N.M. The site is 2,100-feet underground and excavated into the 3,000-foot thick salt formation. Each panel consists of seven rooms. The rooms are 33 feet wide, 300 feet long, and 16 feet high.
In approving new panels 11 and 12, the EPA said in the Aug. 19 Federal Register, “This decision is based on a thorough review of information submitted by DOE, independent technical analyses, and public comments. EPA found that DOE demonstrated that the use of two replacement waste panels to replace lost waste disposal volume in panels 1, 7, and 9, would provide a reasonable expectation of the WIPP remaining in compliance with the 10,000-year release limits set by the ‘Environmental Standards for the Management and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, High-Level and Transuranic Radioactive Wastes’ at 40 CFR part 191.”
Mining has been going on for a year on panel 11, following state environmental approval. Don Hancock, who has followed WIPP for decades for the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, explains that the state regulates the chemical aspects of WIPP, while the federal government – EPA — regulates the nuclear impacts. The state regulators and the feds are supposed to coordinate their reviews of the project.
Hancock told The Quad Report he had hoped that EPA would conduct a formal rulemaking in its review of the WIPP expansion project. That would have provided, he said, “a more detailed discussion of the joint issues” of the plan.
Instead, EPA largely deferred to DOE’s views of the expansion. “DOE wanted to move quickly. EPA had mixed feelings,” Hancock said. He said part of the problem is that at EPA, all of the people who were knowledgeable about WIPP “are gone,” partly as a result of the depredations of DOGE and also because of job buyouts.
Hancock noted that WIPP is legally required to close by 2033. Keeping it open will require action beginning soon, including programmatic National Environmental Policy Act review. He said the various parties have been promising for years to begin the NEPA process, but always delay for various reasons, making the ultimate decisions likely to be chaotic.
“We need to start that,” he said, “but it has been put off repeatedly. None of this makes sense.”
Hancock also raised the question of whether other nuclear waste repositories will follow WIPP. It is a “pilot” project. The law that created it When WIPP was being formed, Hancock noted, promised the state that there would be “at least one other repository.”
DOE and SIMCO are holding a public meeting in Hobbs, N.M., this week to discuss current and future issues related to the expansion project. The question of other repositories is likely to come up. Long-time observers suspect that the WIPP model can’t pilot replicas off the New Mexico airstrip.
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