The legacy cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico now has a public website about its efforts to remediate contamination along a public road in Los Alamos County.
Radioactive contamination was discovered in February 2020 within a 28-acre parcel of land along DP Road that DOE had already declared fully remediated before it was transferred from the lab to Los Alamos County in 2018.
Much of the early work by Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) and DOE’s Office of Environmental Management involves investigating 124 potholes along the road to check for additional contamination. This task is 60% complete, N3B said in a May 20 update on the website.
“The purpose of the investigation is to gain confidence that radioactively contaminated debris will not be encountered during future development of the land parcels owned by Los Alamos County,” N3B said on the website.
Radiologically contaminated debris was found buried in one of the potholes near an area already known to be contaminated and will be investigated further, N3B said in a May 14 notice.
In late April, N3B started sending containers of low-level radioactive waste from Middle DP Road to the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) disposal site in West Texas. Each container holds about 16 cubic yards of soil.
The remediation plan by DOE and its contractor was approved by the New Mexico Environment Department in April. The DOE is supposed to provide the state with an assessment report on the waste remediation by April 30, 2022.
The contamination on DP Road was discovered when a crew working for the county was preparing to install a sewer line for a new housing complex.
