The Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons remediation contractor at the Los Alamos National Lab will resume normal operations at the lab’s Area G next week, DOE’s local cleanup fed told a citizens advisory board this week.
“We are resuming normal operations, processing operations at Area G next week,” Michael Mikolanis, manager of the DOE Environmental Management field office, told the Northern New Mexico Citizens Citizens Advisory Board on Wednesday.
Huntington Ingalls-led cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) had to take a “pause” to resolve some safety issues, Mikolanis said. There have been fits and starts at Area G this year. In late January, N3B put Area G operations on hold for more than a week, citing questions about the area’s safety basis documents and some vehicle related incidents.
As work resumes at Area G, workers will also be retrieving buried cement and transuranic waste in Area G contained in corrugated metal piping. It is the first time DOE will dig up underground material at Area G since the mid-1990s, the field boss said.
The advisory board held a hybrid meeting with some members meeting in person and others participating remotely.
COVID
Meanwhile, Mikolanis said Wednesday, more than 90% of the workers for both the Department of Energy environmental management field office and the legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, are now vaccinated against COVID-19.
About 97% of Environmental Management’s Los Alamos staffers are now vaccinated, as are about 91% of N3B staff, Mikolanis said. In addition, about 91% of Los Alamos County residents are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the field office manager said. In a slide presentation, he also said contract workers are expected to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4.
Los Alamos management and operations contractor Triad National Security has claimed a 99% vaccination rate.
Within the next few months, Mikolanis said to expect the Office of Environmental Manage to issue guidance on returning more staffers to on-site operation from telework. A “return to work plan” was getting close a couple of months ago “when the Delta variant popped up,” he added.
Down DP Road
Cleanup of radioactive contamination on a stretch of a public road outside the laboratory property in Los Alamos County is “in the home stretch,” Mikolanis told the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board this week.
Contractor N3B has finished excavating the soil around 124 potholes and backfilling is now underway, Mikolanis told the advisory board. “We found no surprises…. We remediated all the contaminated sites that we found.”
The work at Middle DP Road should be done by the end of the year, and the project should be officially closed out in April 2022 when the Office of Environmental Management and its contractor file a report to the New Mexico Environment Department, Mikolanis said.
Radioactively contaminated soil was discovered along a 28-acre parcel on DP Road, not far from planned new housing developments in February 2020, a couple of years after the Los Alamos National Laboratory transferred the land to the county. The lab thought the parcel was free of contamination, at the time.
