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What really went wrong at WIPP: An insider’s view of two accidents at the only US underground nuclear waste repository?

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 28th June 2019 , Within a 10-day period in
February 2014, two accidents happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
(WIPP) in New Mexico – the United States’ only underground repository
for nuclear waste.
First, a truck fire deep in the mine spread soot over
key equipment and disabled the repository’s air monitoring system. Then a
chemical reaction breached a waste drum, causing a radiological release
that contaminated large areas of the repository.
Two Accident Investigation
Boards and a Technical Assessment Team identified the immediate causes of
the accidents and recommended remedial actions.
The author, who served as the Deputy Under Secretary of the Energy Department at the time of the
accidents and during the three years WIPP was closed, examines the larger
problems within the Energy Department and its contractors that set the
stage for the accidents. He places the blame on mismanagement at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory; structural problems created by a statutory
“fence” between the National Nuclear Security Administration and the
rest of the Energy Department, including the Office of Environmental
Management, which is responsible for disposing of the waste from more than
60 years of nuclear weapons production; and a breakdown of the “nuclear
culture.”

https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/what-really-went-wrong-at-wipp-an-insiders-view-of-two-accidents-at-the-only-us-underground-nuclear-waste-repository/

July 1, 2019 - Posted by | incidents, USA

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