Adrian Hedden
Carlsbad Current-Argus
achedden@currentargus.com

One thousand shipments of nuclear waste were sent to a federal repository near Carlsbad in the two years since a new contractor assumed control of the facility.

Salado Isolation Mining Contractors (SIMCO), a subsidiary of international construction company Bechtel, officially took over the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s operations Feb. 5, 2023, replacing Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) which held the contract for the previous 10 years.

SIMCO, formed by Bechtel exclusively to operate the repository, was signed to the $3 billion contract in November 2022. The agreement included four base years of WIPP operations followed by six optional one-year extensions.

The company replaced NWP, which was owned by Amentum and served chiefly to oversee the site’s recovery from an accidental radiological release in 2014, an incident that led to a three-year shutdown of the facility’s waste emplacement activities.

Amentum and its subsidiaries previously held the primary WIPP operations contract in the years after disposal began in 1999.

Since then, 14,331 shipments of nuclear waste were sent to WIPP from federal nuclear facilities around the country as of May 3, according to the latest data published by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The agency uses WIPP to dispose of transuranic nuclear waste (TRU), which is clothing materials, equipment and other debris irradiated during nuclear activities.

The waste is buried at WIPP in a salt deposit about 2,000 feet underground. The salt gradually collapses on the waste, burying the refuse and blocking radiation from escaping.

On Thursday, May 8, the number of shipments received at WIPP under the SIMCO banner officially reached 1,000, according to a company news release.

A ‘mixed bag,’ critics say

The 1,000th shipment came from Idaho National Laboratory, the most frequent shipper of waste to WIPP with 7,544 –about 52% – of the waste shipments, according to WIPP shipment data.

The lab also contributed more shipments to the 1,000 under SIMCO than any other site – 744 or about 75% of the total.

“It has been an honor to work with the dedicated staff in the WIPP organization. It takes all of us to safely get a shipment from our generator sites to emplacement at WIPP,” read a statement from SIMCO. “This milestone reflects the dedication and coordination of the teams involved and highlights SIMCO’s ongoing commitment to supporting the nation’s nuclear waste cleanup mission.”

Don Hancock, nuclear waste program manager at the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center – a government watchdog organization and frequent critic of WIPP – said SIMCO’s performance was a “mixed bag” since the company took over.

“SIMCO has not had a major accident,” Hancock said, alluding to the 2014 incident under NWP’s watch. “That’s a low bar.”

He argued SIMCO’s most recent performance-based bonus, about $15.7 million awarded for Fiscal Year 2024 – Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024 – was poorly justified. Hancock pointed to 490 shipments to WIPP out of a goal of 520 cited in a “report card” put out by the DOE last year detailing the reasoning for the bonus.

“They have not really met the aspirational shipping targets they had,” he said.

The report card evaluated SIMCO’s performance in five key areas, including “very good” or excellent” ratings for quality, schedule, cost control, management and regulatory compliance. SIMCO’s lowest rating, for cost control, was 76%.

Hancock said this was because of struggles to complete a site-wide ventilation system rebuild that started with an estimated cost of $135 million in 2019 and was expected to be finished by 2021. The most recent estimate, from 2022, placed the project’s budget at $486 million, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

WIPP officials estimated the system would go into service this summer or fall.

“They’re behind schedule and over budget,” Hancock said. “Their management of capital improvement projects, I think, has not been great.”

What other facilities ship to WIPP?

After Idaho, the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina was the next highest shipper of waste to the site with 1,804 shipments, records show.

Savannah River was followed by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in northern New Mexico with 1,691 shipments and the Handford Site in Washington with 572.

The now-defunct Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site near Denver had the second-highest number of shipments with 2,045 before being shut down in 2006.

Hancock chided WIPP’s operators for failing to increase shipments from Los Alamos.

Perceived low shipment rates from the northern New Mexico facility where in coming years the federal government plans to increase development of plutonium pits – triggers for nuclear warheads – was a sticking point, Hancock said, as he hopes to see New Mexicans get the most benefit from WIPP.

In 2023, as SIMCO took over operations, the energy department was embroiled in negotiations with the New Mexico Environment Department for a 10-year renewal of WIPP’s state operations permit.

One major provision of the permit renewal called for WIPP to prioritize shipments from Los Alamos. In Fiscal Year 2024, which ran from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, the department touted 49 shipments of waste in SIMCO’s annual scorecard.

Hancock said the number of shipments from Los Alamos, a number he admitted was influenced by the lab’s efforts to prepare waste for WIPP, was inadequate to be counted as a SIMCO success.

“The priority of LANL shipments – rhetorically they do that but in practice they do not,” he said. “The huge majority of shipments come from Idaho. DOE and SIMCO should take more responsibility for that. They can’t blame it all on Los Alamos.”

Managing Editor Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, or @AdrianHedden on the social media platform X.