Los Alamos National Security (LANS) no longer has the Energy Department’s legacy cleanup contract at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but it posted a strong performance during the most recent fee review period, which ended March 31.
LANS took home 94 percent of the total fee available for its last review period as lab cleanup contractor, which began Oct. 1, 2017: over $3.92 million of a potential $4.17 million, the Energy Department said Tuesday.
In November 2017, DOE confirmedLANS had finished treating 60 potentially combustible containers of radioactive waste at the lab. The drums held a mixture of organic kitty litter and nitrate sales similar to the combination that in 2014 blew open a container at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The resulting radiation release shut down the underground transuranic storage facility for nearly three years.
Remediated waste had to be removed from each container and mixed with the inert substance zeolite and water, DOE said. The waste was subsequently repackaged into new drums.
The Energy Department on Tuesday praised LANS for addressing those drums, along with processing an additional 27 drums of unremediated nitrate salts by March of this year.
All the drums, which remain stored at LANL, will eventually be shipped to WIPP.
LANS is a consortium of Bechtel National, AECOM, BWXT Technologies, and the University of California.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) took over legacy nuclear cleanup at the end of April. Its contract is worth roughly $1.39 billion over a decade. The work includes protecting a regional water aquifer, cleaning up contaminated legacy sites in and around LANL, and decontamination and demolition of structures.
The LANS tenure as LANL’s management and operations contractor ends later this year as the new contract has been awarded to a group called Triad National Security.
