The Department of Energy said Tuesday the legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico started cutting recently dug-up corrugated metal pipes into sections small enough for shipment to the agency’s underground disposal site for transuranic waste.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) workers are using hydraulic shears to cut up 158 pipes, DOE said in a Tuesday press release. Each pipe is 20-feet-long and holds cemented radioactive waste, weighing between 10,000 and 14,000 pounds. That’s roughly the weight of two base-model Toyota Tundra pickup trucks, according to the manufacturer.
The pipes are sliced into five smaller segments that can be fit into standard waste boxes, DOE said in the release. N3B hopes to finish digging up the contaminated pipes and cutting them down to size around March 2024. The resulting transuranic waste will eventually travel to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
N3B started excavating the pipes last September but early worker safety issues factored into a temporary suspension of work.
The pipes were temporarily buried at Technical Area -54’s Area G in 1986. The pipes are part of the remains of a Cold War era radioactive liquid waste treatment facility that operated at the Los Alamos Technical Area 21, DOE said in the release.
