Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
3/28/2014
Shifting focus to groundwater contamination for its next cleanup campaign, Los Alamos National Laboratory is seeking $31 million to begin a Chromium Pump and Treat Remedy Project that will be launched in Fiscal Year 2015. Los Alamos is taking a campaign approach to cleanup work at the lab, and is currently in the final stages of a major effort to remove aboveground transuranic waste. Officials have said that groundwater cleanup will be the next big focus. As a pilot program to pump-and-treat hexavalent chromium at Mortandad and Sandia Canyons wraps up in FY’15, “large scale treatment or mitigation activities,” will begin, according to the budget request.
The release of about 160,000 pounds of chromium into the environment at the lab occurred between 1956 and 1972 when the material was used as a corrosion inhibitor at a lab power plant. A chromium plume was discovered in 2005, and the cleanup work is taking place under a consent order from that year between New Mexico, LANL, and the Department of Energy, which will be renegotiated once the aboveground transuranic waste effort is completed. The hexavalent chromium concentration in the regional aquifer stands “at twenty times the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission drinking water standards,” the DOE Fiscal Year 2015 budget request states.
Pilot Program Launched Last Year
Protecting the area water supply is a top priority for the state, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said earlier this month. “Like many of our neighbors in the southwest we are in the throes of an extreme drought. … Water issues continue to play a critical role and we will have to focus on that,” Flynn said at the Waste Management conference. Last year, LANL launched a pilot test effort that pumped about 4 million gallons of groundwater, according to officials. “The measures and testing will inform the corrective measures evaluation to determine the appropriate remedy in FY 2015 to correct the contamination problem,” states the budget request. “The magnitude of the problem and the associated risk is driving an aggressive schedule for transitioning from the current pump tests from monitoring wells in FY 2013, into a pilot extraction well in FY 2014, and into a remedy project proposal in FY 2015.”
Total Project Cost Between $25-50 Million
The Department of Energy requested about $31 million for the project in FY’15. That includes $4.6 million for preliminary engineering and design, $24 million for total estimated cost and $2.5 million for other project costs. The total project cost is estimated to be between $25 million and $50 million for the facility. “It is considered reasonable to operate for at least five years. Based on pump and treat projects across the DOE complex, it is also conceivable that the system may be run for several decades (although this is not considered that likely),” the request states. No funding will be spent until a plan for addressing the chromium is approved by the state.
The project will be connected with the pilot extraction well and “up to four additional large-scale or large-volume extraction wells, as many as eight re-injection wells or some sort of re-infiltration gallery, piping connecting the various extraction wells to a central treatment location, a centralized treatment facility with multiple treatment trains, sampling systems, a water disposal methodology for blow-downs of filtration units, a process control system with remote control capability to preclude permanent personnel being stationed in remote Laboratory canyon areas, and miscellaneous equipment,” the budget request states. Capacity could be more than 1,000 gallons per minute.
