The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wants the Department of Energy and its legacy cleanup contractor to prioritize a new safety analysis for the waste handling area of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that is currently in limited operations.
Since January 2020, contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) has declared 24 potential inadequacies of the safety analysis at Area G within Technical Area 54 at Los Alamos, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Chair Joyce Connery said in an Aug.17 letter. The letter is addressed to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
To address this, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management has approved six “justifications for continued operation,” developed by N3B, Connery writes. As a result, N3B plans to continue “a limited set of operations” under the stopgap analysis.
Nuclear facilities have documented safety analyses that describe the hazards present in those facilities and how to operate safely amid those hazards. Sometimes, operators discover things in the facility that aren’t accounted for in the safety analysis and have to pause their work to investigate. Sometimes, operators and the DOE prefer to continue operations while investigating the abnormal conditions.
Limited work at Area G will include retrieving above-ground containers from storage arrays in preparation for transuranic drum shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, according to the letter. It also includes early work to reduce the size of, and package, corrugated metal pipes; draining transuranic waste containers that include free liquids; and “venting the four flanged tritium waste containers with potentially flammable headspaces” now stored in sheds near Dome 48.
The DNFSB staff considers Area G safety “adequate in the interim until a new safety basis is approved and implemented in calendar year 2023,” according to the letter. But DNFSB encourages DOE to “expeditiously complete and implement” safety basis controls consistent with DOE Standard 3009-2014. The standard describes ways to prepare a DOE-acceptable Documented Safety Analysis for nuclear facilities without a nuclear reactor.
Area G is used to chiefly store, prepare, repackage, remediate, certify and ship transuranic and low-level waste, DNFSB noted in the letter and accompanying document dated Aug. 17.
Because of the potential inadequacies of safety analysis, N3B developed a half dozen justifications for continued operations and 49 new safety controls – mostly administrative in nature.
