Before leaving office with the rest of the Donald Trump administration, then-Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette asked a federal nuclear safety board for a 60-day extension to produce a report on concerns about transuranic waste handling at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In the letter dated Jan. 19, and posted last week on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) website, Brouillette asked DOE be given until March 19 to respond to a board technical report on “Potential Energetic Chemical Reactions Events Involving Transuranic Waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
“The extension request is based on the complexity of the issues involved, and the desire to ensure that an integrated, complete and accurate response is provided,” Brouillette wrote.
In a Sept. 24 letter to DOE, Thomas Summers DNFSB’s acting chairman at the time, said the board believes safety oversight at Los Alamos by both the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration don’t fully account for the possibility of chemical reactions in drums of transuranic waste.
The DNFSB letter urged DOE to look at transuranic waste storage, handling and processing across Los Alamos facilities to be studied in order to catch potential problem drums before they’re shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In February 2014, an improperly packaged drum of waste from Los Alamos burst open underground in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, shutting down waste emplacement at the facility for nearly three years. In April 2018, several waste drums overheated and blew off their lids at the Idaho National Laboratory. Both incidents illustrate the need for “multiple layers of protection,” according to the DNFSB letter.
