CARLSBAD, N.M. - If you’re a fan of fans, a new ventilation system at EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) will blow you away.
Six enormous fans are integral to WIPP’s new $288 million Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, which will significantly increase the amount of air in the underground portion of the WIPP facility.
The system will provide about 540,000 cubic feet of air per minute to the WIPP underground, significantly more than the nearly 170,000 cubic feet of air per minute of the facility’s current ventilation system. Each fan will stand 20 feet tall and weigh 44,000 pounds. The units will generate over three-fourths more power than the existing system’s fans.
The Encorus Group of New York is building the fans. Tom Gilmartin, the company’s lead engineer for the project, said the operation will be the largest containment fan system in the DOE complex.
The WIPP repository is mined out of a salt bed 2,150 feet underground. The fans will pull air through a salt-reduction facility to remove salt from the air that would otherwise build up on the system’s high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. The system is designed to run continuously in HEPA filtration.
Crews broke ground for the system this past summer. Construction is expected to be completed by early 2021.
WIPP was constructed for disposal of defense-generated transuranic waste from DOE sites. The waste consists of clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil, and other items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other manmade radioactive elements.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
