Limited record keeping at the old Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado might have factored into an April 2018 waste drum “explosion” at the Idaho National Laboratory, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Chairman Bruce Hamilton said Tuesday.
There were “marginal records kept” on drums of Rocky Flats-origin sludge waste buried at INL for years before workers opened and repackaged the four drums that overheated and blew off their lids on April 11, 2018, Hamilton said in testimony before the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
The old records from Rocky Flats were not always explicit on “what was kept in which drums that were buried,” Hamilton told subcommittee Chairman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) during a hearing on budget requests by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
“It would seem by 2018 we should know how to store nuclear waste,” Cooper said.
The drums spewed radioactive material inside the Accelerated Retrieval Project No. 5 (ARP-5) facility within the lab’s Radioactive Waste Management Complex. “I call that an explosion. Maybe that’s a politically charged word,” Hamilton said.
There were no injuries, as no one was in the facility when the incident about 10:30 p.m.
“The folks I talked to back home want zero defect in the handling of nuclear material. Zero,” Cooper said. The lawmaker also alluded to the February 2014 underground radiation release that forced DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico out of service for about three years.
Hamilton said there is no way to achieve “zero” risk within the DOE weapons complex. “The only way to have zero risk is not to do anything.”
The DNFSB plans to hold a hearing on the Idaho drum breach in May. A date was not yet listed on the board calendar as of Friday.
Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White concurred with Hamilton’s statement, saying her office is working to learn everything it can from the accident. “We take these things very, very seriously at EM,” she said, noting she has “worked in the field” herself.
Hamilton said he was satisfied that White and the DOE nuclear cleanup office are taking “appropriate and reasoned” steps to prevent such an accident from recurring. White offered to give Cooper a follow-up briefing on the drum breach, and the lawmaker accepted.
Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons from the 1950s until the late 1980s. The Rocky Flats containers were being reopened and the material repackaged after having been buried at INL for decades. Ultimately, the transuranic waste will be sent to WIPP.
Fluor Idaho said in an October analysis that the temperature inside the drums at Idaho rose to about 150 degrees Celsius after depleted uranium contacted air for the first time in years. Also, material from the drums generated methane, a flammable gas. The company said it has addressed safety concerns and could resume repackaging waste at the site within the next month.
