Staff Reports
WC Monitor
1/29/2016
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is planning one or more hearings in New Mexico around March to address issues with the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Area G, Doug Hintze, manager of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Field Office at the lab said on Wednesday.
“We’ve been informed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board that they’re planning on holding some hearings out here sometime in the March time frame associated with Area G,” Hintze said during a brief report to the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board.
Area G is the nuclear waste depository at LANL, where hazardous waste is stored and processed prior to shipment off-site for permanent disposal.
In a letter dated Jan. 7, to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery highlighted new safety concerns at LANL’s nuclear facilities. Among other matters, she enclosed a set of preliminary observations that DNFSB staff had made about deficiencies in emergency preparedness and response at LANL.
One of the observations addressed protecting the public in the event of an accident involving “the inappropriately remediated nitrate salts.” Nitrate salt-bearing waste from LANL was in a container that breached at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014, releasing radiation into the underground transuranic waste storage area. The facility near Carlsbad remains closed, though DOE plans to resume waste emplacement there by the end of this year.
Unshipped canisters containing the inappropriately remediated salts in that category have been isolated in a customized storage structure with a special cooling system in Area G.
An earlier report by a DNFSB site representative at LANL, dated Oct. 2, stated that Area G personnel began a fact-finding process after determining that the radiological risk values for certain types of nitrate salt wastes may have been underreported by up to a factor of 10.
The most recent update, from the week ending Dec. 25, noted, “Activities at Area G remain largely curtailed due to several unresolved inadequacies in the safety basis,” namely that the efforts had yet to achieve a final “render-safe” treatment.
After the citizens’ advisory board meeting, Randy Erickson, associate director for environmental program at LANL, reiterated that the board was coming for a hearing and said the issue of the nitrate salts would be part of the discussion, although he thought the meeting would take a fairly broad look at the issues at Area G. “This is all information emerging from the investigations that have been going on,” he said. “That been a major focus.”
DNFSB headquarters personnel were unable provide additional information on short notice Thursday.
