Processing of potentially combustible waste containers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory could be finished by Thanksgiving, a source in New Mexico said this week. That would be ahead of the latest official schedule for completion in December.
An official with the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management told the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board on Oct. 25 that 52 of the 60 remediated nitrate salt drums had been processed and the remaining eight should be done by Thanksgiving, said Scott Kovac, operations and research director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The DOE official reported that lab management and cleanup contractor Los Alamos National Security plans to start on 29 drums of unremediated nitrate salts in late November and be finished with those by the end of March 2018.
One month earlier, a DOE official told the same advisory board that LANS was on the 43rd of the most troublesome 60 containers, which contain a mix of nitrate salts and kitty litter much like the lab-origin drum that in 2014 burst open and released radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The Energy Department could not be reached for confirmation of the latest numbers.
The March date is significant given that DOE recently announced a six-month, $65 million extension for LANS’ environmental management contract at Los Alamos, keeping the contractor on the job through March 30, 2018.
The $65 million extension should enable LANS to finish work on the drums that hold a combustible mix of nitrate salts and organic kitty litter that caused a drum from the lab to burst open and release radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014. The process involves adding the inert substance zeolite into the mix to prevent combustion. The repackaged waste will ultimately be shipped south to WIPP, which reopened earlier this year.
LANS had missed earlier schedule targets for processing of the remediated and unremediated wastes of June 30 and September 30, 2017, respectively. It earlier had expected to finish treating the remediated nitrate salts by Dec. 22 and the unremediated nitrate salts by April 10 of next year, according to a recent report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Los Alamos National Security is a consortium of Bechtel National, AECOM, BWXT Technologies, and the University of California.
