Thanks to more than a quarter-billion dollars of congressional funds since 2018, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is tearing down some of the most contaminated facilities in the weapons complex and “making bad things go away,” a manager at the California nuclear-weapons design lab said recently.
Much progress has happened since the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Livermore Field Office and the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) inked a memorandum of understanding in May 2019 on excess facility removal, Mark Costella told Weapons Complex Monitor in a recent video interview.
The collaborative effort has Livermore immersed in large-scale demolition for the first time in 20 years, said Costella who works for Bechtel-led management contractor Lawrence Livermore National Security as program manager for transition and disposition.
“We had to rebuild that knowledge base,” Costella said. This was done in part with assistance from sister DOE sites as well as groups such as the Energy Facilities Contractors Group, he added.
The planning is complicated, Costella said, by the compact one square mile footprint of the main laboratory site within the city of Livermore, population 90,000. The lab is surrounded by housing, light industry and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory, he said.
The laboratory plans to tackle demolition of 13 facilities between now and fiscal 2029. All the priority work is set for the main site in Livermore. At some point demolition projects will also be launched at Livermore’s Site 300, the 7,000-acre experimental test site 15 miles outside of Livermore.
Until then, “we have a massive backlog of facilities on the main site that need attention.” Costella said.
Livermore uses various strategies to speed demolition, Costella said. In some cases, the management contractor runs the work, in others Environmental Management contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or an EM-solicited contractor will do the demolition. Some small structures could be “fed-led” by the Livermore Field Office, Costella said during a September presentation to ExchangeMonitor’s Radwaste Summit.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management lists four big accomplishments at Livermore during 2021.
- Building 280 Livermore Pool Type Reactor was demolished.
- Tore down the southern two-thirds of Building 175.
- Started characterization of Building 251, the Heavy Elements Building, and
- Awarded the first task order to APTIM for demolition of Building 251 under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) nationwide contract.
Costella expects EM will put out solicitations for slab and soil cleanup for both Building 280 and 175 within the next several months. At Building 251, where Livermore National Security handled characterization work, Costella suspects APTIM could mobilize in November and the Building could be down to slab in 2025.
Planning for demolition and removal of Building 292 at Livermore, the Rotating Target Neutron Source Facility, is still in the early stages, Costella said. The demolition of 292 will also occur under the Environmental Management nationwide contract’s task orders.
Between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022, Congress approved $262 million in funds for Environmental Management to remediate large contaminated facilities at Livermore, Costella has noted in industry presentations.
The funding came after a 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report urging EM to better integrate NNSA’s old shuttered facilities into its priorities. Without doing this “EM may be prioritizing cleanup for lower-risk facilities under its management ahead of facilities at NNSA that may present a higher risk of spreading contamination,” GAO said at the time.
“There is a cost and a risk to the complex,” Costella said. “We consider them a partner on our plan, not an outsider coming in to take control.” Tearing down contaminated buildings, many of them a half-century old, will free up badly-needed space for Livermore to advance its national security work, he added.
The management contractor has developed a “handover process” where it considers what would be reasonable for address, as far as equipment removal and other prep work, Costella said.
It is too early to say when all the high-priority excess facilities at Livermore might come down, Costella said. “We want to keep the real-time queue moving forward.”
