Meet-a-Manager: Mark Bollinger Discusses WIPP’s Vital Role in DOE Missions

Carlsbad Field Office Manager Mark Bollinger, right, stands with Joe Lopez, the office’s chief of staff, fully equipped with safety gear in the underground of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeast New Mexico.

Mark Bollinger is manager of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO), which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeast New Mexico. To mark the successful completion and startup of a new ventilation system at WIPP, EM Update spoke with Bollinger about the important role WIPP plays for EM and the broader DOE, and the work in progress to prepare the site for a successful future.

What brought you to WIPP and what excites you most about managing this key site?

The exciting part is being involved in a mission that is so clearly beneficial to everybody in this country and really, on this planet. A mission that has cleaned up generator sites across the U.S. while having so much support from this local community. To have community members feel ownership of the facility and to support it consistently is very rewarding.

EM is celebrating the successful completion of WIPP’s Safety-Significant Confinement Ventilation System. What role does this new system play in helping WIPP contribute to EM and DOE goals?

It’s all about supporting the cleanup of DOE sites. It’s important for WIPP to be a reliable partner and to be there when they need us. For example, as we continue to clean up Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), they'll have a need for us to be available and operating. What the new ventilation system, now known as the Underground Ventilation System, or UVS, does is allow us to do waste emplacement at the same time we do mining in preparation of future waste placement areas. Concurrently, we can maintain ground-control activities to keep everything safe in the underground. This system allows us to do all of that at the same time, with plenty of fresh air for all the workers in the underground.

Can you further discuss how WIPP supports EM in the legacy cleanup mission at LANL?

We have prioritized all waste removal from LANL, as it becomes available. The state of New Mexico will reap benefits from having WIPP here. We're very proud that LANL’s shipping rate has doubled on a weekly average and they have been able to move well ahead of schedule on disposing of waste from the corrugated metal pipe project.

With the new ventilation system complete, what are EM’s next steps for upgrading infrastructure at WIPP and preparing for the future?

As I look out my office window, I can see the salt hoist, a project we completed an overhaul on that allows us to remove salt from the 2,150-foot level and bring it to the surface for storage. That system, to be fair, was ancient, so we made a huge investment of our operational dollars to prioritize that project to make it a system that will be a tremendous asset for many years.

The biggest topic we are now planning for is hoisting. Everything we do is reliant on our ability to hoist things up and down over 2,000 feet. We have a new project called the Hoisting Capability Project that will give us at least two major hoisting benefits. One is that we will replace what we call the air intake shaft hoist. That hoist has a motor from 1926, almost 100 years old! We need a brand new purpose-built hoisting system. The other element to the hoisting project is to take the new utility shaft, which is a massive air intake shaft, and put in a purpose-built hoisting system to move personnel and materials safely, on a high frequency basis. That will allow us to reserve our waste hoist for its primary purpose — to move waste into the underground.

WIPP plays a unique role for our country in serving as the only geological repository approved for radioactive waste disposal. As DOE works to unleash commercial nuclear power, what lessons can WIPP offer for creating successful disposal approaches for waste?

If you're writing the history of the success of WIPP, most of the book is going to be about the partnerships we have with our state, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and especially the surrounding communities. As the city fathers have told me many times in story after story, they used to go to Washington to demand that WIPP be located here, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. That’s exactly the type of community I would be looking for if working to site a commercial nuclear power project or any other sort of waste disposal facility in the future. I would look for a community that understands operations and how safe it really is.

The other thing we've learned over time is that there is no benefit to rushing — you can lose years and billions of dollars when you make small, simple mistakes. I stress to our team that we work at the speed of safety, that we don't do the work if we can't do it safely. With those two tenets, partnership and working safely, you're very highly likely to be successful in future commercial nuclear power activities and disposal activities.

What do you think has been the secret to EM’s success in building and maintaining strong relationships with the communities around WIPP?

I think it’s been the commitment of many in EM to work day-in and day-out with key people in the community, keeping an open door policy to work as true partners in what we're doing. The community here understands what they're doing on behalf of America and they are very, very proud of it. It’s important to all of us to do everything we can to keep them proud.

What are you most proud of in your time here at CBFO?

It's not just one thing, it's a number of things. I'm very proud of our ability to get the big infrastructure projects done. I'm very proud that we keep being a reliable partner for our generator sites throughout completing those big infrastructure projects, continuing to emplace waste throughout most of those efforts. I'm especially proud of our relationship with the community and their support for WIPP. And on a very personal level, I'm just very, very happy that I have been part of building a team and watching the individuals succeed, whether they are contractor partners or DOE employees.

I'll end on one little quip. Oftentimes I get asked, “Why are you still a pilot plant? You've been around 25 years.” The answer is that we're still learning how to be a plant, even though we’ve operated for 26 years. And when we eventually go into a closure phase — decades from now — we will learn how to close the site correctly and be the pilot of that. The funny answer is, when you’re a pilot, you don’t stop the airplane when you're at 30,000 feet. You continue to be the pilot until you safely land and get back to the gate.