How to Salvage a Nuclear Waste Facility

"You sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security"

and

Aug 21, 2024

Transuranic waste is a nuclear byproduct. What makes it “transuranic” is that it decays over thousands of years, which means it needs dedicated, secure repositories.

Today, we talked to two men who oversaw the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, the only American repository for transuranic waste. WIPP stores material from sites around the country in an underground salt block.

WIPP was hit with two major, back-to-back accidents in 2014: a truck traversing the facility caught on fire, and chemical reactions in a container from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) caused a release of radiological material. The two accidents shut down the facility completely.

Today’s guests, Mark Bollinger and Todd Shrader, were managers of the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) and oversaw the cleanup effort.

Joining me in the interview was Hart Rapaport, a Department of Energy contractor and nuclear waste expert. Hart reached out to me months ago suggesting this would be a surprisingly interesting interview. He was right.

Hart and I spoke with Bolllinger and Shrader to understand:

How does the nuclear waste system work?
How do you maintain a safety culture for decades?
How do you make sure contractors deliver?
Do safety regulations ever contradict each other?
How do you know a disaster will happen before it happens?

What role does WIPP play in the nuclear waste system in the U.S.?

Mark Bollinger: WIPP is a cornerstone of our nuclear waste disposal system. We're the only geologic repository for the disposal of defense nuclear transuranic waste. When we had an incident in 2014 and we were brought down, the complex came to a halt in terms of the transuranic waste.

Two accidents occurred in 2014. What happened?

Todd Shrader: So they happened nine days apart. That’s coincidental, they actually were not related to each other at all. One was in the underground salt caverns. One of the trucks that removes material and waste there caught fire. This was just a maintenance issue in the engine. Eventually, the fire spread to the tires, which caused the smoke. It was a problem inside that long-haul truck itself.

That was the first event. The second event was, quite simply, a chemical reaction. Two incompatible materials came together, and they caused this overpressure in the drum. All the drums are normally vented to relieve overpressure, but this didn’t work, and so much internal pressure built up that it blew the top of the drum off, which spread contamination throughout the immediate vicinity of that drum itself. This was a reaction from however it was packaged originally.

So these accidents occur nine days apart. What happens then? Who's the team that gets together for the short- and medium-term response?

TS: I'll split it into a couple of different time frames. The absolute immediate aftermath, you've just detected the accident. Our site, much like all Department of Energy (DOE) sites, has an emergency command center.

It's staffed by professionals and senior leaders from both the contractor and federal sides. That gets activated right away. First and foremost they work to ensure the health and safety of the workforce. In the second case, there weren't people in the underground, but in the case of the fire, everyone was evacuated from the underground.

That emergency command center stays active 24 hours a day until the underground or the accident site is stabilized. Then you move into more of a longer-term recovery or, because the second event was contamination, a longer-term investigation. That involved first remotely and then with people in protective clothing, going down to try to assess to figure out what the problem was.

When that accident first happened, we didn't know what was wrong or where it was. There was a while spent investigating to figure out exactly what happened. And then you move into ensuring long-term stability and making the systemic changes and the facility changes you need to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Editor’s Note: Following the interview, Bollinger provided further information: “For both incidents, DOE convened accident investigation boards, which conducted a thorough investigation and analysis of the incidents and issued comprehensive reports, including recommended mitigation measures. Implementation of those measures was the responsibility of DOE (LANL, CBFO, and their respective contractors). The state regulator (the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED)) responded separately through their regulatory enforcement mechanism. The enforcement actions resulted in separate Settlement Agreements and Stipulated Final Orders (SFOs) between NMED and DOE (CBFO and LANL). The SFOs prescribed corrective actions and supplemental environmental projects which were implemented by the respective DOE facilities and their contractors.”

After dealing with the immediate effects of the accident, who’s the team that figures out the pathway to recovery and comes up with the recovery plan that was put out in September 2014?

TS: WIPP, like most DOE sites, is government-owned, contractor-operated. So the contractor workforce is responsible for developing the initial plan. The government itself has oversight, we're the owner of the facility, so we reviewed it. In the case of WIPP, we also brought in our national labs to do technical analysis. The contractor is then responsible for executing the plans with the government's oversight.

Is there a specific part of DOE that performs that oversight?

TS: CBFO is the primary office; they're the ones with the federal staff on-site there. There are also other parts of DOE like Environment, Health, Safety, and Security, a headquarters function that has specialized skill sets for safety. In addition, Environmental Management (EM) headquarters can gather resources from around the complex and EM to support CBFO.

What's the role that CBFO plays at WIPP, including in the recovery?

TS: CBFO is the government's owner at the site and had, back then, about 60 federal employees. But their job is to develop the contract and work instructions, because the contractor works under a contract.

And so the contract says, “clean up the site”, or is very general, and then there's often detailed information. CBFO ensures it's being done per all the regulations and requirements, including DOE orders and other regulations.

So it's the oversight of the process. And in some cases, we actually had to approve specific changes to certain documents. The safety basis, for instance, is approved by DOE. The contractor workforce was then over a thousand people, and CBFO was 60.

MB: The contractor workforce today is up over 1,300. And we're down to 50. We use the same kind of contract that is used at national laboratories throughout the complex. That'd be Los Alamos, Argonne, Brookhaven, Princeton Plasma Physics, all these different places, including most of the NNSA sites and the science sites, since they're operational sites.

They use something called a management and operating (M&O) contract. And what that really does is, if the site is a car, we hand the keys over to them. And we say to the contractor, not only do you operate it, but you manage it. And part of your requirement set is that you do a great job managing and operating this entire facility.

We're going to tell you where to go. We're going to tell you what the requirements are. We're going to tell you what your goals are, and what we expect for outcomes. And then we're going to hold you accountable for performance. And we're going to judge you on performance. And so it's an interesting contract that allows us to go to the contractor and say, “This is all messed up. Now, here's where you're going to go. You're going to fix this. Tell us how we're going to get there.” We tell them what to do but not how to do it because we want to hold them accountable for how.

Who are the key players in that initial implementation of the recovery plan?

TS: The contractor was key. I got there in 2015, so they were well underway to recovery. But the contractor and all their workforce were concentrating on updating procedures, processes, and training and in some cases had started decontamination efforts to allow us to get into different parts of the underground.

WIPP also has the challenge that you constantly have to do ground stabilization. In particular, that’s installing bolts because the salt is always moving. And so fairly quickly, we had to get in and start stabilization efforts to maintain the underground.

CBFO has direct oversight on the site with facility representatives (FacReps), what we call the “eyes and ears” of DOE, and our support staff. And then all the way up to the management level, I would meet very often with the president of the company to discuss how things were going.

How does that FacRep oversight work?

TS: A facility representative is a specific job title in DOE. I believe it's just at our nuclear sites. They ensure that the contractor is working and complying with all of the DOE orders and regulations that are out there.

MB: We only have a handful of FacReps, two or three, and they go through a multi-year process to qualify on all the operational systems out at the site.

They're supplemented with a number of subject matter experts in many different areas of the operation. The FacReps don't have to be the experts on everything, but they have to have a good understanding of everything. They need to spend more time out in the field, whereas the subject matter experts might spend time back in the office studying.

Todd, when you joined in 2015, what were some of the challenges you faced to get things recovered before the 2017 reopening?

TS: First and foremost is balancing the fact we had to do operations in the underground. Ground control. I mentioned we have to keep stabilizing our ground. It's just the nature of salt.

At the same time, we were significantly overhauling how we did work in the underground. There were large parts of the underground you had to suit up into anti-contamination clothing. Frankly, this is hot and uncomfortable, with big gloves on, so you have less dexterity. The WIPP underground doesn't have air conditioning. In the summer it's hot, in the winter it's cold.

Particularly around the second accident, we were also working to change the waste acceptance process. There was a group, the National Transuranic Program, that worked with all the other DOE sites to ensure they had the new controls in place to ensure chemical compatibility. They're working with all of the generating sites to ensure they've changed their processes and procedures for us to ensure safe waste.

As you mentioned, the waste at WIPP comes from other sites, and some of that waste was responsible for the second accident. How do you make sure that everyone at those other sites is pulling their weight and following the waste acceptance standards?

TS: It's a document called the Waste Acceptance Criteria (WAC). This has a significant list of criteria that must be met from packaging the waste, identifying the waste, what the history of the waste is — basically completely understanding what is in the waste stream.

MB: This is what we call our certification program. We have to certify that all waste containers are fully compliant to come to WIPP. Since 2014, we’ve made additional improvements to this process. This all leads to a new and improved WAC, which is currently 117 pages. You have to follow every requirement there. That will tell you to go do things like visual examination, documentation review, compatibility studies, and everything just to move one drum of waste.

Is that certification done at WIPP or is this done at the sites that are sending you the waste?

MB: It's always done at the sites. Ideally, as the waste is being generated, you're watching it. The Idaho site, for example, videotaped themselves packaging the waste. If there's any question, you can go back to all the evidence and all the paperwork and all the data.

All of the procedures and processes they use to do the certification process are then themselves QA'd each and every year to make sure that they're still following all those requirements.

One of the things highlighted in the accident reports was the need to change the safety culture. How do you fix how people work?

TS: At the time of the accidents, WIPP had been operating for 15 years with an extremely good safety record. With sites like that, you sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security.

There are little things that you should take care of right away: an alarm set point that's not quite right, a piece of equipment that's broken but still usable. You start accepting those. It's just human nature. It's very common when you look at any accident report. You start accepting things you wouldn't have before.

So safety culture is just continually re-emphasizing that you shouldn’t accept — this is too strong a word — degraded work conditions and ensuring that everyone is empowered to bring things up. One thing we really look at in safety culture all the time is that no one has any fear of raising a safety issue, including if it means shutting work down.

Was there a missing part of that culture in the run-up to the 2014 incidents? Was there a lack of willingness to speak up about safety issues?

TS: I don't think it was that as much as a little bit of, “We've done it thousands and thousands of times safely.” You start believing it's always going to be safe because it's always been safe. And so you lose a little bit of that questioning attitude of assuming every single time something could go wrong.

In the aftermath of a crisis, it's easier to get back on track with that culture. As time passes, as another 10 years go by without more incidents, how do you maintain that level of focus? It seems like a natural human instinct to fall off.

MB: That's one of the most important jobs of management and leadership. We’re having an external group come in and do a safety culture survey this summer. So that group exists and they do those regularly. You bring people and you have a full complete survey.

There's also many indicators of performance. You watch the number of first aid cases, you watch the number of days away, you look for serious injuries. If you're having serious injuries, then you know that something has gone way out of balance.

Before the accident, they were up over 30 shipments per week. As I look at things today, I don't think we could operate at that level safely. What I tell people is that we can operate at the speed of safety. If we can't do it safely, we're not going to do it. We can't overreach, and we have to have a sustainable number. Right now, I believe that number, on a consistent basis, is somewhere around 17 shipments a week.

That’s far less than what we did before the accident, but it's still a significant amount and allows us to continue in a sustainable manner to meet the needs of the complex.

You have to set expectations at the highest level. You have to reiterate. You have to do surveys. You have to set the process in place and it's a constant battle.

One of the Carlsbad field office’s key focuses today is the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) and the Utility Shaft. Why are those so important?

MB: When you're in a mine, air is your most important commodity. You need fresh air especially if you're using diesel equipment, which most people end up doing. That exhaust has to be tightly controlled in case we ever have another incident like we did in 2014.

What SSCVS allows us to do is move a massive amount of clean air into the underground and filter it all. If there's an incident, it will be captured in this filtration system. You then need a massive shaft for the air to come into and blow across the site, which is why the Utility Shaft is so important.

The SSCVS will be the final step in recovering from 2014 because you'll have that safety system in place to handle any incidents similar to what had happened in the past.

How did these projects come about? What does the planning look like?

MB: In the recovery, they were looking at what their options were to deal with future incidents. The decision was made that the existing system was not robust enough to allow you to emplace waste and do all the necessary mining activity with diesel equipment at once. Because WIPP is so important to the entire community, we have to figure out how to make it a really reliable destination. We can't have other sites accepting three years of drummed waste sitting there. The idea was, “What would be the best and final option if we were going to give you all the air you could need and filter it all?”

And so they set about designing it. What happens in DOE is we ask our contractor to begin the project. And they find the best contractor in the world to design those kinds of systems. They design it. They come to us with an estimate. There's a very robust project program in DOE that's based on old Department of Defense projects.

These projects are planned according to our DOE Order 413. So we call them 413 projects, meaning projects over $50 million. It's a rigorous process where first you have to get approval for a need, then you have to get approval for your options, then you get approval for your design, then you get approval to start construction, and then you have approval to end.

How does that 413 project process work?

MB: If in the course of our mission, we need to build or rebuild something, then we can propose a project. That starts the process of a needs analysis. And so we would document those needs in various white papers and studies.

We presented it to the Department who can deny it or approve it. That we call critical decision (CD) zero. You get started through a declaration of need.

If we all agree that there’s a need, we go about the process of preliminary designs and ideas and options. It can be over a year of study of what's the best way to meet this need. In the end there's a range of alternatives that are studied and then we whittle it down into a final analysis. So the selection of the range of options is CD-1 and CD-2 is when we get to actually start designing a final solution.

There's a 2020 GAO report on the SSCVS and Utility Shaft that talked about some of the problems WIPP was facing with construction, one of which was identifying contractors with experience working with specialized nuclear facilities. How did you overcome that?

MB: Throughout the government, it's not uncommon for contractors to fail. We have a lot of systems put in place to identify when that's happening. There's one called the Earned Value Management system. There's any number of other ways that we look to see that somebody is not going to do it.

We try through the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) to only pick people who are experienced and proven to do the types of jobs you're doing. Oftentimes you're doing jobs nobody's ever done before. Sometimes it's jobs where you can't find somebody that combines experience in the underground, ventilation, and nuclear activity.

In our case, we wanted what's called a safety-significant system, which implies that the quality requirements are NQA-1, which is a nuclear quality assurance level. When you apply that level of quality to everything, there's very few contractors that work in that world. It becomes challenging for some contractors and some of them don't work so you have to identify them, move on and quickly get in another contractor to get the job done.

Is there enough competition among contractors? I imagine that if you're looking for a lot of experience and certain quality assurance, the number of contractors you can even look at is very limited.

MB: This is one of those areas where we also force our M&O contractor to do what the FAR [the Federal Acquisition Regulation] requires, which is full and open competition and to not accept limited competition.

If they’re doing something wrong in the contracting world, that prevents certain people from applying. Maybe it's timing – if we did it three months later we'd get eight bids. We can go back and forth with industry and say, “Are we doing something wrong in this procurement? Or is there some limiting factor?”

It could be, for example, the Buy America Act applying to every single piece. I'm just making that up. And they might say, “If you take that off, then we're in fully.” They can't bid with that particular requirement. The contracting team can work to make sure they maximize the amount of bidders that are available by checking each and every requirement.

But it is sometimes very hard. Sometimes they miss the mark and have to start over again. Sometimes they'll go out and they'll pay site visits to contractors that didn’t bid to ask, “Why not?” Those contractors might tell you they're just too busy or they can't make enough money off the government. You keep looking until you find a good competition.

Does the FAR impose any restrictions on the kinds of bids that you can put out that you'd like to see changed or lifted? We've talked to some other interviewees who have OTA authority in their own jurisdictions and they've been big fans of that for flexibility. Would it be helpful in your case?

MB: I think there are probably specific cases where the FAR limits our ability, but by and large the department is very supportive of the FAR and our ability to work within it. Oftentimes what we find is that it’s not so much the FAR itself, it's our ability to interpret and work within the flexibilities that are already there.

Our WAC is 117 pages. The FAR must double or triple that easily. So it is extremely challenging to do government work because of the FAR, but it also allows us enough flexibility within it that if you’re properly educated and experienced you should be able to work with it.

The GAO report also discussed difficulties getting regulatory approvals from NMED. What is it like working with state and local partners outside of the federal government?

MB: WIPP in general should be viewed as one of the most regulated facilities in the world. It's a pilot plant for a reason — it’s a one-of-a-kind, first-of-its-kind facility. The number of regulators that have a say in being able to move one drum of waste is tremendous.

There's the whole regulatory side of things. And then there's the whole stakeholder and community involvement side of things. They're two of the most important aspects of what we do at WIPP.

The regulatory structure at WIPP involves the EPA because we're doing a 10,000-year nuclear waste repository and the EPA regulates that. They require us to do performance assessments and studies to clearly identify that this waste will be safe for 10,000 years. That’s a very complicated process that involves many millions of dollars a year, every year, in studying that.

The state of New Mexico owns our hazardous waste permit. They control the hazardous elements of what we put underground and how much and what kinds and those sorts of things. They happen to have very inclusive requirements in terms of stakeholder involvement.

That puts us squarely in the world of making sure that we're always open and honest with what we're trying to do, what we want to do, and why we want to do it. Our new permit with the state requires us to constantly be in the public talking about that.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also plays a key role in what we do in terms of our packaging, and the Department of Transportation plays a key role in our transportation. So it just goes on and on.

Do you ever find that all of those different regulatory jurisdictions conflict? “This person says ‘X’, this person says ‘Y’, what do we do?”

MB: Yeah, especially when you're talking about different states. One state may have this feeling on something and another state will have quite a different feeling. And that can be very challenging because they're both able to regulate within their states and the federal government does not use a bully pulpit and say, “This is the way it's going to be.” We have to be extremely respectful of each state's rights.

We have the challenge of transporting all of our waste. Not only is my team responsible for characterization and certification, but we also have the contractor who does the actual transportation. We put our trucks into the highest level ever created of truck inspection, which means they have to be 100 percent fully operational. Every piece and part. And we have to inspect all those.

We have to do inspections at each state line since each state, as you go through, sets their own rules for whether they want to inspect every shipment, whether they want to inspect everyone, whether they want to escort those shipments, whether they want to be notified about the shipments, and how they want to track those shipments.

So when we go through, for example, Wyoming, we have one set of rules and one inspection level, but it's their set of rules in terms of how much we pay to have their police show up and do that inspection and how much they allow us to move through. And then when we get to the Colorado border, what are we allowed to do there? So each state, we have to work with each one of them and make sure that we meet their requirements.

We talked earlier in the context of safety culture about assessing whether the changes that have been made throughout the recovery were working as intended. How does that work in other areas?

MB: That's the cornerstone of what we do each and every day as federal oversight. And because I have a M&O contractor, it's also their responsibility to make sure that we don't have any problems like that.

We have requirements for self-assessment. We have a massive QA team with all the contractors that we use and all the work we do at the characterization certification programs at all the sites. We have tons and tons of assessment and regulation, but it's actually absolutely necessary when you're dealing with the kind of waste we handle and you're trying to demonstrate to the world that it can be done and it can be done safely.

I'll give you one example of a new sort of assessment that we started doing since 2014. It's called a Generator Site Technical Review, which goes beyond the normal sort of certification program review and looks at all the waste practices, including the type of practices that created our problem in 2014.

So we've got new layers of assessment at the generator sites that allow us to have an additional layer of comfort to know that that organization is doing everything they should be doing when they're generating and packaging that waste.

Looking back on everything, what are the key takeaways from the WIPP recovery?

MB: One that comes to mind is the pressures they were under at the time. Looking back 10 years later, they felt the pressure to produce, meaning to put a lot of waste underground very fast. And that necessitated a very high rate of mining activity.

That could have caused the lack of maintenance on the truck that caught fire. That's very simple. But if you're running the truck too much and you're not taking care of your equipment then you have the potential for an issue.

And, for the amount of waste that they were putting underground, that may also have led to issues where they weren't being as careful as they needed to be and bought the wrong sort of absorbent.

So one of the lessons I learned is that you can only move at the speed of safety. If you go beyond that, you're going to have problems. And those problems will have massive repercussions far beyond the issues that you take on by moving at that speed of safety.