Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    In a report from NMED, the agency defended it its granting of the permit for the utility shaft as a necessary measure to increase airflows in the underground facility. They also said that they were going to combine the construction of the shaft with another project to construct a New Filter Building to rebuild the WIPP’s ventilation system.
    The report said that the DoE can request future permit modification requests (PMRs) as long as the WIPP’s total capacity does not exceed six million two hundred thousand cubic feet of waste as stipulated in the original WIPP Land Withdrawal Act. The report claimed that “NMED has concluded that the proposed new shaft is important for current underground operations and worker safety.”
    Hancock contended that the construction of the utility shaft was part of a broader attempt to increase the amount of waste stored at the WIPP beyond the legal limit set by the Act. Hancock said, “The issue here is that this new shaft is needed to expand the WIPP facility, so it can handle more waste and stay open for longer that it’s supposed to. The public has not had a chance to discuss and talk about any of that. DoE wants to do this all in piece-meal fashion so that the public and state can never look at the big picture.”
      Bobby St. John is a spokesperson for the Nuclear Waste Partnership which is the contractor hired by the DoE to run the operations at WIPP. He said, “The (DOE) Carlsbad Field Office and NWP have no comment on the appeal by Southwest Research and Information Center. WIPP will continue working with NMED.”
      Maddy Hayden is a spokesperson for the NMED. She said that the TA was granted after a thorough investigation by the agency. She added that the authorization was for the construction of the shaft and did not constitute approval of the planned use of the shaft. She also said, “While we can’t comment extensively on a pending legal action, the Department spent a substantial amount of time thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluating the TA request and stands by the decision to approve the activities in the TA, which are limited to the excavation of the ventilation shaft itself but not the use of the ventilation shaft.”
     There have been prior incidents of mismanagement at the WIPP. Originally, the rooms hollowed out of the old salt mine where WIPP is located were to be closed and sealed with thick doors of concrete and steel as soon as they were filled with transuranic waste. Then the operators relaxed the rules and said that a thin steel door would be sufficient to properly seal the rooms. Finally, they decided that they did not need to seal the rooms at all even after they were full. This led to the incident which closed the WIPP when a barrel in an unsealed but full room exploded and released radioactive materials. Because the room was not sealed, the radioactive particles were able to escape from underground through the ventilation system. Watchdog groups are justified in being concerned about the operation and planning going on at the WIPP when the prior mismanagement is taken into account.