While Triad National Security’s program appears adequate to detect potentially combustible chemicals in transuranic waste from National Nuclear Security Administration work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a safety board wants to see improvement.
That is the crux of a Jan. 19 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm about Triad’s program to evaluate the chemical compatibility of radioactive wastes generated at Los Alamos nuclear facilities.
The Department of Energy weapons complex has suffered big accidents over the past 10 years, including a February 2014 radiation leak from a ruptured drum at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and an April 2018 explosion where four separate drums blew off their lids at an Idaho National Laboratory structure.
While not mentioned by the DNFSB letter, there was also a big cesium-137 spill by a lab contractor in downtown Seattle in 2020.
A DNFSB report in September 2020 concluded “safety bases for both National Nuclear Security Administration and Environmental Management facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory do not consistently or appropriately consider a potential energetic chemical reaction involving transuranic waste.”
The following year DOE beefed up its safety requirements, DNFSB said in the letter to Granholm. The board, which lacks regulatory power, makes independent safety recommendations to DOE.
In its letter, DNFSB urged DOE to have Triad better define the interface between its general safety program and the chemical compatibility evaluations. The board also wants more documentation for excluding certain materials from combustion analysis.
Triad, which manages the laboratory for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), has a new procedure that ensures materials from an inert glovebox spend at least seven days exposed to air before being disposed of as waste.
“This control helps ensure that any materials that are potentially reactive with air will complete such reactions before being disposed of as waste,” DNFSB said.
To date, Triad has completed combustion evaluations for all the waste generating processes at the Plutonium Facility and is working to complete such evaluations for the remaining Triad facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Another contractor, Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) is in charge of preparing and shipping legacy transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for the Office of Environmental Management. The contractor has its own combustibility tests.
