Amid other defense waste developments at the sprawling Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a recent report from lab prime contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS) continued what has become an annual drumbeat for moving newly generated low-level waste off-site.
In its Los Alamos National Laboratory 2015 Annual Site Environmental Report, published last week, LANS repeated plans to dispose of new low-level waste — generated by the impending restart of plutonium pit production at the Department of Energy facility under the Obama administration’s planned nuclear deterrent modernization program — exclusively off-site.
In particular, LANS wants to increase reliance on commercial storage facilities, such as those operated in Andrews, Texas, by Waste Control Specialists and in Clive, Utah, by EnergySolutions. EnergySolutions is buying Waste Control Specialists. Both companies already have Los Alamos low-level waste in their possession.
In the 2015 environmental report, LANS said low-level waste disposal at Area G would cease by Oct. 1, 2017, when Pit 38, the area’s last disposal pit, is expected to be filled with legacy low-level waste and capped off.
Officially, however, there is no date set in stone for closing Area G, LANS spokesman Peter Hyde said by email Thursday.
“The remaining operational life of the facility has yet to be established by DOE and [the National Nuclear Security Administraton],” Hyde said of the 63-acre Area G: the lab’s main holding area for transuranic and other solid, radioactive wastes.
DOE has the option to expand Area G into an adjacent plot of land known as Zone 4 and dig out new disposal shafts there for low-level waste, LANS wrote in February in its annual Area G report. While Hyde’s statement Thursday appeared to keep that possibility open, LANS’ February report recommended “that any further planning for Zone 4 expansion be deferred for the foreseeable future.”
That recommendation was borne out in the White House fiscal 2017 budget request, which noted LANL’s proposed $200 million budget for the year would include funds for “solid waste risk reduction activities (including ceasing low level and low-level mixed waste (LLW/LLMW) operations at Area G).”
Some Los Alamos low-level waste has been sent to DOE’s Nevada National Security Site, which routinely accepts such material. Meanwhile, Area G will continue to serve as a staging ground for new transuranic waste created by the Pentagon’s modernization efforts. At Area G, this more radioactive waste stream will be prepared for eventual disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
WIPP has been closed since 2014 after an underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire. The facility is still slated to reopen in December or January, DOE says, despite a recent decision to permanently close off the mine’s southern end after a series of ceiling collapses there.
Los Alamos shipped about 2,000 metric tons of low-level waste off-site for disposal in 2015, according LANS’ 2015 annual report. That equates to about 60 fully loaded tractor trailers worth of waste. Low-level waste production is down astronomically from the recent peak year of 2011, when Los Alamos disposed of a combined 31,000 tons of low-level waste, roughly 16,000 tons of which went to other facilities.
The sharp spike in disposal of low-level waste that year, and the subsequent drop-off in disposal levels, was due to the decontamination and decommissioning of Los Alamos’ Technical Area 21 buildings using stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Those buildings housed Cold War-era plutonium-refining experiments, among other things.
No Trouble With Tritium
Meanwhile, LANS said this week that potentially explosive barrels of tritium-bearing waste in Area G, flagged in a recently released report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, are as safe as can be and pose no logistical complications for treating the inappropriately remediated nitrate salt waste — the same kind that caused the 2014 radiation release that shuttered WIPP — stored there.
“The [tritium] waste containers are configured to pose minimal risk to Laboratory employees, the public and the environment,” Hyde wrote in a Thursday email. “The containers are not susceptible to spontaneous energetic reaction, are located in an area with restricted access, and are being evaluated.”
Tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, is a key ingredient for the nuclear weapon known as a hydrogen bomb. Its production and location are closely guarded military secrets, even when the material is bundled up with barrels of waste like the cache at Los Alamos.
All Hyde would say Thursday is that the unspecified number of barrels of tritium waste cited in the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report are “stored in a different location” from the nitrate salts whose cousins caused the WIPP shutdown two years ago, and that tritium waste treatment will have “no impact on the schedule for the treatment of the [nitrate salt] drums.”
In early September, LANS personnel discovered that “several Flanged Tritium Waste Containers may be pressurized with an explosive mixture of hydrogen isotopes and oxygen,” according to a Sept. 9 report the Defense Nuclear Facilities Board uploaded to its website last week.
The final schedule for treating and disposing of the nitrate salt waste at Los Alamos “is still under development,” Hyde wrote Thursday.
At an industry conference Sept. 15, Doug Hintze, manager of DOE Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office, said the nitrate salts would be cleaned up by next summer and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant some time between 2018 and 2022.
