What's up with WIPP? Pilot plant failing to meet shipment and disposal goals

Special to The Observer

First in a two-part series The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is not achieving the goals set three years ago to accelerate disposal of nuclear weapons waste at the world's first underground geologic repository.

A new 93-page report, The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: How Well is "Accelerated Cleanup" Working? issued by SRIC, shows that WIPP has disposed of about 75 percent of the waste planned, or about the same amounts as before the "accelerated cleanup" program was announced.

The report is the first study of how well WIPP and the sites with large amounts of nuclear weapons waste are meeting the performance goals established in 2002 when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued "Performance Management Plans" (PMP). The plans were designed to speed up shipments of waste to WIPP so that millions of cubic feet of dangerous radioactive waste would be disposed by 2012, or about 20 years earlier than previously scheduled. The "Accelerated Cleanup" Program also was supposed to save billions of dollars.

Low-level of radioactive nuclear waste has been shipped through New Mexico and Sandoval County since WIPP shipments began coming into the state from the north in the mid 1990s.

The report analyzes the plans and the actual performance at the major sites that are to send transuranic (TRU or plutonium-contaminated) waste to WIPP - Hanford, Wash.; Idaho National Laboratory (INL); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico; Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR), Tennessee; and Savannah River Site (SRS), South Carolina, as well as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Local citizen watchdog organizations monitoring those sites also participated in preparing the report.

For FY 2003, the WIPP PMP projected disposal of 8,939 cubic meters of contact-handled (CH) TRU waste; 7,542 cubic meters was actually disposed. In Fiscal Year 2004, the WIPP PMP projected disposal of 12,366 cubic meters; 8,810 cubic meters was actually disposed. Therefore, for the two-year period, 77 percent of the total amount projected was actually disposed.

The amount of waste sent in fiscal years 2003 and 2004 by individual sites varies from the amounts projected in their plans. SRS exceeded the disposal amounts included in the WIPP PMP - shipping 5,525 cubic meters, as compared with the 2,132 cubic meters planned. Hanford shipped 698 cubic meters, as compared with the 666 cubic meters planned. However, INL, the site which has about half of all the CH waste in the WIPP inventory, shipped 909 cubic meters as compared with the 8,650 cubic meters in the WIPP PMP, or about 11 percent of what was planned. Los Alamos shipped 327 cubic meters, as compared with the 1,835 cubic meters planned.

Updating the report for fiscal year 2005, which ends on Sept. 30, will again show that WIPP will not achieve the planned goal of 12,247 cubic meters being disposed. The volume of waste disposed this year will be less than in FY 2004.

WHAT IS THE "ACCELERATED CLEANUP" PROGRAM?

In February 2002, DOE announced its "Accelerated Cleanup" program, which is supposed to reduce costs and risks for the millions of cubic meters of radioactive waste (high-level, TRU, and low-level) at dozens of sites around the country. The program includes additional funds "when a site and DOE reach agreement on an expedited schedule that shows measurable gains and can be held accountable." State governments where DOE sites were located were to agree to Letters of Intent to demonstrate their commitment to the program.

Congress supported the DOE program and in the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 required that DOE "shall allocate, to each site for which the Secretary has submitted to the congressional defense committees a site performance management plan, the amount of those funds that such plan requires."

A major element of the program is to dispose of TRU waste more quickly, which is said to save money by reducing the operating costs of WIPP over its lifetime and by reducing waste storage costs at many of the sites. In the summer of 2002, 18 DOE sites developed PMPs which provided some details about how wastes at those sites would be managed and about measures that could be taken to speed up clean up of the sites. At sites with TRU waste and at WIPP, the PMPs proposed various measures to change existing schedules and practices, including characterizing the waste inventory, developing new shipping containers and procedures, changing operations at WIPP, and modifying regulatory requirements. The site that has shipped the largest amount of waste to WIPP, the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, did not prepare a PMP because no acceleration was planned beyond the schedule of completing waste shipments to WIPP by 2005.

The SRIC report analyzes how well each site and WIPP are meeting the goals and milestones of the plans, discusses how well projected cost savings are justified, and reviews regulatory and other relevant issues. The analysis primarily covers the first two-plus years of the plans, updating the information through at least 2004, and in some cases, up to July 2005.

NEXT THURSDAY: Basic findings on TRU waste inventory, shipments, cost savings and what should be done.

Article courtesy of Voices from the Earth, published quarterly by Southwest Research and Information Center. Reach them at 262-1862.