Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System Is Rising from the Desert

Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System Is Rising from the Desert The enormous, $288-million project is WIPP’s largest construction effort in three decades

The safety significant confinement ventilation system (SSCVS) currently under construction in New Mexico will be the largest containment fan system among Department of Energy facilities and will provide a modern air supply system designed to run continuously in either unfiltered or HEPA filtration mode. The system will provide approximately 540,000 cubic feet per minute (cfm) of air to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) underground, significantly more than the 170,000 maximum cfm provided by the current ventilation system.

The increased airflow will allow simultaneous mining, rock bolting, waste emplacement, maintenance and experimental scientific operations. The permanent ventilation construction project is scheduled to be completed in 2025, and includes two primary buildings – the salt reduction building (SRB) and the new filter building (NFB) – as well as support structures, such as the fabrication building and trailers for contractors and staff involved with the immense project.

The SRB prefilters salt-laden air coming from the WIPP, while the NFB has fans and HEPA filtration to further remove contaminants from the exhaust air.

The Industrial Company, a Kiewit subsidiary, is the new lead contractor on the project and has been making substantial progress. The first of 44 concrete pours on the NFB foundation, known as slab-on-grade, was done in mid-May. The concrete and rebar steel work are the first safety-significant work for the SSCVS. The pours continued through August.

Rebar coming out of the ground at the building site indicates where shear walls, which are load bearing, will be located. The 41-foot high shear walls for the SRB are already in place and will support tilt-up prefabricated walls that are being constructed in San Antonio, Texas. As of press time, 40% of those panels were finished and installed. Columns, beams and side panels will be added, followed by roof panels to complete the building. The SRB should be fully enclosed by the end of the calendar year.

The building’s salt reduction units have started to arrive. The cleansed air that will come from the SRB will head to the NFB, which will have four 1,000-horsepower fans pulling the air through HEPA filtration before exiting through a 125-foot stack. Fifteen of the 22 HEPA filter units are stored in shrink-wrap in the fabrication building, with the remaining seven expected to arrive before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Located in the northernmost part of the Chihuahuan Desert, WIPP doesn’t get much rainfall, but when it does, it’s in the form of massive summer thunderstorms. The underground stormwater runoff system – which includes drains, pipes, and runoff ponds – is essentially complete. Good thing, too, as it was put to the test recently by heavy storms that rolled through the area.

The installation of thousands of feet of electrical conduit, running from a nearby Xcel Energy substation, has been completed and is awaiting the arrival of cable.

WIPP is gaining a new fire water system that includes storage tanks, larger mains and an alarm system. Part of the system will loop around the SSCVS.

During the week of May 24, the entire south section of the loop was installed at once, a huge leap toward completion of the project’s underground work.

“What we’re trying to do is get all the underground work completed in one go, so that we have the surface open,” said Steve Smith, Nuclear Waste Partnership Capital and Infrastructure Project manager.

“We’re going to be bringing in a lot of trucks with all the steel, all the rebar, the precast panels, so we need to have the surface open and available.” n

This article was published June 4, 2021, on WIPP’s news/information page: www.wipp.energy.gov/wipp_news_20210604.asp.

The shear, or supporting walls, of the Salt Reduction Building rise more than 40 feet in anticipation of the arrival of tilt-up prefabricated walls that will attach to the shear walls. The round holes in the shear walls are for inbound and outbound air from WIPP’s underground.