Two sources in New Mexico said Thursday the Los Alamos National Laboratory is slightly more than two-thirds through treatment of potentially combustible waste containers.
At a late September meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, an Energy Department official reported that 20 drums of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts remained to be treated, one source said. The source added that laboratory management and legacy cleanup contractor Los Alamos National Security is currently averaging about three to four drums per week at the Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility.
A second source said the New Mexico Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste Bureau was informed the contractor was on the 43rd canister, out of 60, as of Tuesday. Another 29 drums of unremediated waste also remain to be processed.
The Energy Department last week announced a six-month extension for LANS’ environmental management contract at Los Alamos, valued at $65 million and keeping it on the job through March 30, 2018. Los Alamos National Security, the management and operations prime at LANL, is a consortium of Bechtel National, AECOM, BWXT Technologies, and the University of California.
The extended contract will allow LANS to continue work on the containers, which 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 in December after a nearly three-year closure following the radiation incident.
One of the sources contacted this week said that Los Alamos now expects that the remediated nitrate salts will be finished in November. Los Alamos National Security 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. In both cases, that is months after respective contractual milestones of June 30 and Sept. 30.
