One of two major buildings for a modern air supply system designed to improve air quality for workers in the underground at EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is quickly going vertical.
Office of Environmental Management
September 21, 2021
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CARLSBAD, N.M. – One of two major buildings for a modern air supply system designed to improve air quality for workers in the underground at EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is quickly going vertical.
That’s in no small part because of a construction method being used on the building that speeds the process and quickly changes the WIPP skyline.
WIPP’s Salt Reduction Building (SRB) is being enclosed with precast concrete walls. Built in San Antonio by the Tindall Corporation, the insulated walls are trucked to the site on flatbed trailers and lifted into place by a 250-ton crane.
There are 32 wall panels between the building’s 41-foot-tall concrete corners, support structures known as shear walls. The wall panels weigh up to 47,343 pounds, or 23 tons. Four additional panels on the west side will be installed at a later date; the opening will be used to bring equipment into the building.
The largest containment fan system among DOE facilities, the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) is designed to run continuously in unfiltered or high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration mode. The system provides approximately 540,000 cubic feet per minute (cfm) of air to the underground, significantly more than the 170,000 maximum cfm provided by the current ventilation operation. The increased airflow will allow simultaneous mining, rock bolting, waste emplacement, maintenance, and experimental scientific operations.
The SRB includes 64 roof panels, up to 34,400 pounds each; 15 roof beams, 24,450 pounds each, and 18 support columns, weighing up to 20,626 pounds each.
The Industrial Company (TIC), a subcontractor to Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), WIPP’s management and operations contractor, has ramped up construction of the system, the largest construction effort at WIPP in three decades.
“To date, with the initiation of work under this new main build subcontractor (TIC), the project is 16 days ahead of schedule, with any quality issues being quickly resolved,” said Steve Smith, NWP’s capital infrastructure manager. “This work is truly a collaborative team effort between the NWP SSCVS project team and TIC.”
Precast walls are generally less expensive and less labor intensive then poured concrete. Instead of waiting for concrete to cure within forms, the precast walls are lifted by crane and fastened in place.
The 25,000-square-foot SRB will be the first step in the SSCVS filtration process, prefiltering air before it goes to the New Filter Building (NFB), the other major SSCVS building. The SRB uses water misters and filters to drop airborne salt out of the exhaust stream that comes out of the WIPP underground. WIPP’s underground nuclear waste repository is cut from a 2,000-foot-thick layer of salt laid down 250 million years ago by the shallow Permian Sea.
The prefiltered air that goes to the NFB is pulled by four 1,000-horsepower fans through HEPA filtration units. The 22 sets of filters are switchable, meaning underground activities do not need to be curtailed while a filter changeout occurs. The filtered air is then exhausted out a 125-foot-high stack
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