03 October 2011The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) program to clean up the country's Cold War legacy at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has taken delivery of its 10,000th shipment of transuranic (TRU) waste.
Located 26 miles outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP is a DOE facility designed to safely isolate defense-related TRU waste from people and the environment.
Waste temporarily stored at sites around the country is shipped to WIPP and permanently disposed in rooms mined out of an ancient salt formation 2150 feet (650 metres) below the surface.
According to the DOE, the shipment consisted of defense-generated contact-handled TRU waste, from its Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project in Idaho, which has accounted for nearly half of the shipments WIPP has received.
WIPP's first shipment came from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1999. By the end this year, the DOE says that legacy TRU waste at two-thirds of the original waste sites will be dispositioned at WIPP.
Since its opening, WIPP has received and disposed of more than 77,000 cubic metres of defense-related TRU waste that has been transported a total of more than 12 million miles from locations across the country.
As of August 2011, the Department claims that it has achieved a total Cold War legacy cleanup footprint reduction of 55%, or 515 of 931 squares miles.
Investments made through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allowed the Department to accelerate cleanup efforts. The DOE says that these investments in the TRU waste program have reduced lifecycle costs by $1.2 billion.
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