It could take some time for the Energy Department to decide how to handle 113 drums of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts stored at a privately operated disposal site in Texas, a senior DOE official said last week.
The waste originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which as of this month has completed treatment of its remaining stock of remediated and unremediated nitrate salts.
The Energy Department needed four years to determine its approach and then process nearly 90 containers of waste that were on-site at the nuclear-weapon lab, Doug Hintze, manager of the DOE Environmental Management Field Office for Los Alamos, noted during a panel discussion at the Waste Control Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz.
He speculated the process would not be any quicker for the drums stored at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas. At LANL there was the advantage of having a site that is overseen by the federal government, Hintze said.
The waste was left over from Cold War-era plutonium production at LANL. It had been packaged, by mistake, with organic kitty litter that later mixed with the nitrate salts in an explosive combination.
Standard procedure has been for Los Alamos to ship nitrate-salt containers to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico for permanent burial, but the facility was offline for nearly three years after a February 2014 radiation release. It took months for DOE to determine that a nitrate-salt drum from Los Alamos had caused the event, by which time the nuclear-weapon lab had shipped 113 of the containers to Waste Control Specialists for temporary holding.
At Los Alamos, DOE and site contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS) starting in May 2017 repackaged the waste with the inert substance zeolite to prevent combustion. A total of 60 potentially combustible containers of the nitrate salt waste were treated by November 2017, followed by a separate 27 drums of unremediated nitrate salts this month, DOE announced March 20.
“Right now, we are developing a feasibility study” for options to treat the waste drums at WCS, Hintze said. While he did not discuss the full range of options, one could be treatment in place at Waste Control Specialists, Hintze said.
In December 2017, DOE awarded the Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract to Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos, a joint venture of Stoller Newport News Nuclear and BWX Technologies. In late January, the new team started its formal 90-day transition to replace LANS, which is also being replaced as the management and operations contractor at Los Alamos.
“They could have mailed it in: They could have said, they are getting rid of us as the contractor, we are just going to do the minimum,” Hintze said of LANS. Instead, the contractor – a partnership of Bechtel, BWXT, AECOM, and the University of California — worked hard to fix the situation, Hintze said.
DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said during the panel discussion other nitrate salt drums already empaneled underground at WIPP do not pose a threat. The drums are empaneled in salt and behind bulkheads where air won’t reach them to cause combustion, Shrader said.
LANL Investigates Misplaced Waste
Meanwhile, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported Wednesday that LANL has some explaining to do regarding how it lost track of two containers of hazardous waste, which sparked a weeklong search.
Los Alamos reported its own error to the New Mexico Environment Department in a March 19 letter. The newspaper said the missing material was found Feb. 5, packed inside a 55-gallon drum. No substances were released into the environment.
The newspaper quoted a LANL spokesperson as saying an investigation was ongoing and early indications suggest correct procedures were not followed.
The specific waste that got lost included a quarter-gallon of silver-filled epoxy in one of the containers as well as toluene diisocyanate in the other, according to the newspaper.
