Nuclear wasteNuclear waste kept in parking area as N.M. repository remains closed

The federal government’s only underground nuclear waste dump, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, remains closed and state environmental officials have set deadlines for the Department of Energy and its contractor-operator of the site to deal with radioactive waste left above ground at the repository.

USA Today reports that dozens of drums and containers which have been shipped from federal facilities around the country are being stored in a parking area at the plant, and inside the plant’s waste-handling building.

Typically, nuclear waste is stored in the plant’s deep underground salt beds, but the repository has been closed since early February as a result of radiation  release that exposed thirteen workers to radiation (see“Operations at a New Mexico nuclear waste repository suspended because of leaks,” HSNW, 19 February 2014). Under its permit with the state, the plant operator, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, can keep waste stored in the parking area for only thirty days and up to sixty days in the handling building. The state is now extending both deadlines to allow the federal government time to implement an alternative storage plan if the underground dump remains closed for more than ninety days.

Jeff Kendall, general counsel for the state’s environment department, said state officials believe allowing more time to fully consider all options for safely storing the nuclear waste is the best action. “To require them to begin to systematically ship particular waste units back to points of origin or back to particular locations in a rather expedited fashion was not the best thing as far as environmental health or human health in this instance,” Kendall told USA Today. Kendall noted that the agreement with the federal government gives the state more explicit oversight as to what happens with the waste.

WIPP had operated for fifteen years without major incidents, but on 5 February 2014, a truck used for hauling salt in the underground chambers caught fire, shuttering the plant and halting all waste shipments. Nine days later, a radiation alert activated in the area where new waste shipments were being stored. Officials have yet to determine what may have caused the radiation leak, and they have been unable to access the underground portion of the repository. The plant now has roughly eighty essential employees on site, working in areas that have been designated as free of contamination.

WIPP is the U.S. first underground nuclear repository and the only facility in the country that can store plutonium-contaminated clothing and tools from Los Alamos National laboratory and other federal nuclear sites. To date, the plant has received more than 11,890 shipments, totaling more than 90,000 cubic meters of waste.