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posted by cmn32480 on Monday August 08 2016, @10:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-where-does-the-waste-goin-in-the-mean-time? dept.

Link: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/doe-certain-wipp-to-open-in-december/article_e0557c93-1fa2-5552-8721-d1bd0b071b82.html

After a truck fire and a leaking drum of radioactive waste shut down the nation's only underground nuclear waste facility near Carlsbad in February 2014, the Department of Energy said that by March 2016, it could cleanup and safely reopen the critical site.

The agency knew it had only a 1 percent chance of meeting that deadline, according to an audit released this week by the Government Accountability Office, an investigating arm of Congress.

In 2015, the agency admitted it couldn't safely reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, even for limited operations, until at least December 2016 — and at a higher cost. Now auditors say even the revised cost estimate was flawed. The agency "did not follow all best practices for cost and schedule estimates," federal auditors found, including having an independent analyst review them.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:56PM (#385308)

    i like the part where they "clean-up" the dump-site, duh.
    maybe next time they can do the "clean-up" before it hits the dump site ^_^

  • (Score: 2) by number6x on Monday August 08 2016, @03:48PM

    by number6x (903) on Monday August 08 2016, @03:48PM (#385332)

    This site is a pilot site to learn how nuclear waste from the many nuclear power plants from around the nation can be stored long term. All of that nuclear waste has been stored in 'short term' storage at the production sites. Part of the reason the states allowed the building of nuclear energy plants because the federal government said it would handle the long term storage of certain types of waste.

    The federal government is decades behind in delivering. The WIPP site is just a pilot designed to implement the best ideas developed up to the time it was built (the 1980's) and to see how well they could be implemented and to learn of weaknesses found when the ideas are implemented in reality. New Mexico volunteered to be a pilot site given the condition that some other state would get to host the permanent site.

    I went to school with a few people who worked at WIPP in the early days. It was an amazing project, but there were and are a great number of unknowns. Nobody had ever attempted storage on this scale. Many things that were supposedly known turned out to be not quite accurate as well. The amount of moisture in the underground salts turns out to be much higher than tests originally showed. The rate of corrosion of stainless steel storage containers is much faster than projected due to the higher moisture and the presence of trace corrosive chemicals that naturally occur in the underground salts.

    I'd rather have them take their time and study the issues, develop solutions and do this right, than get it done quick.

    Maybe they could follow sf writer Larry Niven's advice on how to dispose of it [larryniven.net]?