Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/9/2015
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management on Wednesday announced the demolition of a building at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the ongoing remediation of the New Mexico site’s Technical Area 21. This demolition is the latest of several TA-21 dismantlement projects. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allocated $212 million for several some LANL cleanup programs between 2009 and 2014. Cleanup has fundamentally altered Los Alamos’ now 60-plus-year-old skyline, according to Bechtel spokesman Fred deSousa, who worked at Los Alamos during the Recovery Act projects. The 21-286 structure was a onetime radiologically contaminated warehouse at TA-21, which dates to the Manhattan Project and previously housed the first plutonium processing plant in the world and conducted crucial tritium research, according to a DOE press release. The lab’s current Plutonium Facility came online in the early 1970s. “Those [TA-21] buildings sat empty for a very long time prior to being demolished with the Recovery Act funding, and it was really important to the community,” DeSousa said yesterday. “Los Alamos County wants to be able to reuse that land, at least part of it, at TA-21, so they’re sort of anxious for this as well.”
In August 2014, workers dismantled two water towers that stood at 175 and 160 feet. By September 2011, the Recovery Act had resulted in the decontamination and demolition of 24 TA-21 buildings, the installation of 16 groundwater monitoring wells, and the recycling of more than 1,000 cubic yards of metal. Prior to that, in 2010, workers tore down a cluster of 65-year-old buildings known as “DP West,” which processed plutonium for nuclear warheads from 1945 to 1978.
Demolishing 21-286 reduced TA-21’s overall footprint by 3,310 square feet, DOE said. It said the project included measures to identify hazards before the demolition and to ensure that workers and the public were not placed at risk. “We are committed to the cleanup of TA-21 and the eventual transfer of the land to Los Alamos County. I look forward to contributing to the safe execution of the EM mission, Doug Hintze, the new manager of the Los Alamos Environmental Management Field Office, said in the release.
