The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup field office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, set up in 2015, and its remediation contractor still face staff shortages, a federal safety watchdog heard Wednesday.
Michael Mikolanis, who heads the DOE Office of Environmental Management field office at Los Alamos, told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) there are 11 vacancies among his 41 federal positions.
Meanwhile, Huntington Ingalls Industries-led Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), has an attrition rate of nearly 25% for its 650-member workforce doing legacy cleanup at Los Alamos, president and project manager Kim Lebak told the DNFSB during a field hearing at Santa Fe, N.M.
N3B is aggressively recruiting, holding job fairs and seeking to attract new hires, Lebak said. But at the same time lab manager Triad National Security is also looking for new people, Lebak said, as it races toward production of 30 plutonium pits annually by 2026.
“It’s a hot job market out there,” not just for DOE work, but for other industries such as oil and gas production, Lebak said. The hunt for new hires is common across the country, she added.
N3B is nearing the end of its five-year base period at Los Alamos, and the Office of Environmental Management is in talks with the contractor to pick up its next option period, Mikolanis said. The base ends in April 2023 and if DOE exercises both remaining options, the contractor will stay on for five more years.
Both Environmental Management and N3B faced many challenges when the cleanup field office was set up in 2015 and the legacy waste contract subsequently carved out from the lab management contract, previously held by Los Alamos National Security, Mikolanis told DNFSB.
At the outset, Environmental Management leaned on National Nuclear Security Administration resources, including subject matter experts, in setting up its own field office, Mikolanis said.
Also, some of the most senior environmental remediation workers, apparently spooked by changes in administration of the pension plan, went to work for the laboratory rather than joining N3B in 2017, Mikolanis said.
Mikolanis added due to gaps in the original request for proposals, N3B soon found it needed to create its own information technology support system “from whole cloth” rather than piggybacking onto an existing system at the site.
Most of the kinks associated with the startup have been worked out over time, Mikolanis said. N3B is shipping an increasing amount of transuranic waste to the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, he said.
The contractor and Environmental Management at Los Alamos are also proud of a cooperative program with current lab prime Triad National Security that includes some newly-generated transuranic waste onto shipments to the salt mine that would otherwise only be partially full, Mikolanis said.
Under questioning by the board, Mikolanis said he lacked figures on what percentage of the transuranic waste in joint shipments is recently-generated by the National Nuclear Security Administration at Los Alamos.
During public comment, some citizens questioned if the practice is distracting from Environmental Management’s top priority of shipping the legacy waste away from Area G.
Recent wildfires are a “stark reminder to reduce the risks at Area G,” at Los Alamos, DNFSB chair Joyce Connery said in her opening remarks. The hazards will remain as long as there is radioactive waste stored at the Los Alamos complex, she added.
While N3B’s recent “stop work orders” show safety is taken seriously, Connery said N3B and the Environment Management field office should move faster to update old safety assessment and policy documents at Los Alamos.
A recorded video of the public hearing is available on the DNFSB website.
