Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
3/14/2014
Los Alamos National Laboratory will continue a short-term campaign approach based on risk with future cleanup efforts after the success so far of the aboveground transuranic waste campaign, officials said here last week. New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn called for the continuation of such an approach in September (WC Monitor, Vol. 24 No. 35), and LANL officials last week said that they are planning to build in the future on the ongoing transuranic waste effort. “What we want to do is capitalize on that and look forward and build those campaigns so that we can do that over and over until we are finished,” Dan Cox, deputy associate director of environmental programs at Los Alamos, said at the 2014 Waste Management conference held in Phoenix, Ariz.
The current Consent Decree between the Department and New Mexico calls for all LANL legacy cleanup work to be completed by 2015, which officials have acknowledged will not be met. As a condition to renegotiate that milestone, DOE and the state entered into a framework agreement for the removal of 3,706 cubic meters of aboveground transuranic waste by the end of June— a concern highlighted by a 2011 wildfire that neared the waste storage area at LANL. “When we were confronted with that fire, it really made us step back and say how do we organize and prioritize wheat we are going to do,” Cox said. “Before this we weren’t really doing it based on risk. We have a consent order that’s in place that has a compliance schedule associated with it, and sometimes when you are doing those things you can lose perspective of what really bad things can happen. So going forward, we’re going to key off of the 3,706 project in terms of the risk reduction value in that and really lay out a prioritization based on the risk reduction.”
Flynn: ‘Losing Culture’ at LANL Has Turned Around
The 3,706 effort has been a success so far with waste packaged and shipped ahead of schedule despite budget concerns and the recent shutdown of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. However, DOE has committed to removing the waste by June and is examining options for temporarily storing it during the WIPP outage. Flynn of NMED said last week that there has been a change in mindset since the framework agreement. “At Los Alamos, one of the problems was that there was a losing culture. So just as success breeds success, failure is contagious as well,” he said. “There was a culture, both at the agency level and at the lab, where we were missing deadlines, problems were happening and we weren’t progressing as well as we could otherwise.”
Flynn continued: “Since we announced the framework agreement, we had some unanticipated problems that developed. I didn’t plan on the government shutdown occurring. … It had a huge impact on this project. I didn’t anticipate that we’d have an event at WIPP, but that has happened.” He added later: “But Los Alamos and DOE when faced with those problems, unlike in the past, were much more resilient. They said we’re going to figure out how to fix this and we’re going to get this done. So that kind of culture that has been created where we are really focused on a goal, when we encounter problems we’re going to figure out ways to fix it and make sure we stay on a deadline and get creative and find efficiencies and utilize partners, all these things that have been really great byproducts of this framework agreement and the TRU campaign.”
Officials at LANL say they are now ready to apply the short-term campaign mindset on future efforts based on risk. “We’ve got to take what we do know, it’s time, and we’ve got to make decisions and move forward with the interim and final cleanup actions,” LANL Associate Director of Environmental Programs Jeff Mousseau said last week. “One of the real challenges on 3,706 we recognized the risk and we got tired of the waste sitting there. We figured out how to get the facilities, to get the people, to get the teams, to get the technology, to get that job moving and now in the final weeks of completion. We have got to apply that same approach to our groundwater cleanup, to our surface water, to our [material disposal areas], to our boundary protections, that same type of our field enthusiasm.”
Having a strong safety record and clear goals also helps the LANL effort in a key aspect—maintaining adequate funding, Moussaeu said. “We’re a bunch of engineers. We’re not super creative, so we named the project after the volume of waste we wanted dispositioned. But there’s a reason for that too. It keeps everybody focused on exactly what we’re going to do,” he said. He added later: “The main challenge, the lifeblood of the project is the funding that comes in. The funding that comes in is dependent upon the value of work that appropriators see. So being able to communicate the work activities that are being done in the eyes of people far away from the project site, it’s critical.”
Groundwater An Item For Follow-Up Campaign
Cleaning up contaminated groundwater at the site is another high-risk item that will likely be the focus of a campaign. That includes a chromium plume in Mortandad Canyon. “We did a pilot test in 2013, pumped about 4 million gallons of groundwater, cleaned it and discharged it. This year we want to proceed on with that based on the information we gathered from that and put in a production pilot well and keep that going forward until we work that chromium cleanup. That’s one of the higher risk items for us,” Cox said. There also is contamination of the explosive material RDX in the Canyon de Valle area which will also likely need to be pumped and treated.
Protecting the area water supply is a top priority for the state, Flynn said. “Like many of our neighbors in the southwest we are in the throes of an extreme drought and we haven’t been helped at all by this winter. … Water issues continue to play a critical role and we will have to focus on that,” Flynn said, noting that ranking priorities within the scope of work in the consent order will be based in part on community input. “We are determining what will be important to the communities there, keeping in mind risk that we’ve identified risk reduction as the regulator and we are going to be mindful of trying to use that when it comes to sequencing campaigns,” he said.
Remaining TRU Another Priority
Another priority will be the aboveground waste remaining after the 3,706 campaign ends. “We really took the combustible waste and the dispersible waste as part of 3,706. So we have about 740 cubic meters of above grade now that are more cemented forms, so we want to proceed with our current production capabilities and go ahead and knock out that 740 cubic meters,” Cox said. Also on the list are 31 large spheres known as bolas grandes, as well as 2,400 cubic meters of below grade transuranic waste. “In the short term, we want to keep our planning going. We’ve got a group of folks who are focused on planning those evolutions to do the retrievals while we finish up the appropriate transuranic waste. Those are really the two big things in the waste program,” he said.
Other campaigns include boundary protection controlling stormwater runoff, an issue highlighted by heavy rains last year, as well as the lower-risk material disposal areas. “There’s a lot of work to do at Los Alamos,” Cox said. “Once we get into each one of these campaigns, we want to have the same commitment to these as we had on 3,706. We want to be very specific with the start and finish. We want to be very specific with how we are going to do it. We want to build the flexibility into the schedules and meet those schedules every time. That will really reduce risk in terms of the overall laboratory about as fast as we can. I am very excited to be part of this, and I think there’s an exciting future at Los Alamos.”
