A Waste Isolation Pilot Plant manager said Thursday that the transuranic waste repository will be closed to shipments for at least 18 months and possibly as long as three years.
Jim Blankenhorn told a town hall meeting that a recovery schedule has not been determined, but decontamination and other work to bring the site back online could potentially take 24 to 36 months. The repository has been closed to shipments since a February truck fire followed by a radiation leak several days later.
Blankenhorn – formerly the chief operating officer at Perma-Fix Environmental Services before becoming the recovery manager for site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership – also said the DOE has recently focused its investigation on three to four waste streams. Nitrate salts in waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory were found to have the potential to create a chemical reaction when in contact with organic material, he said. LANL and another site Blankenhorn refused to name had recently switched to an organic absorbent. Scientists from across the DOE complex have been recruited to study that hypothesis and other elements of the investigation.