The Los Alamos National Laboratory this week was about one-sixth of the way through treatment of dozens of containers of potentially explosive waste, an official with a watchdog organization said Thursday following a visit to the Department of Energy facility in northern New Mexico.
Workers as of Wednesday were processing a ninth container of inappropriately remediated nitrate-salt waste at the laboratory’s Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility (WCRRF). A 10th had been transported from storage to the facility, said Scott Kovac, operations and research director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Processing began in late May, and all 60 barrels of the waste are expected to be treated by early August.
Each barrel holds a mixture of irradiated nitrate salts created by Cold War weapons programs and organic kitty litter that a lab subcontractor erroneously used as a drying agent for the waste. Such a barrel from Los Alamos burst open in February 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant farther south in New Mexico, closing DOE’s transuranic waste storage mine for nearly three years.
The sister to the container that exploded at WIPP has already been treated, Kovac said after accompanying the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board on a visit to several Environmental Management facilities at Los Alamos.
At WCRFF, workers are using a glove box to add zeolite, an inert substance, into the containers to ensure the waste mixture is no longer combustible. As processing began last month operators “encountered several challenges that prolonged the treatment” of the second container transported to the facility, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in its most recently released site report from Los Alamos. These included: managing debris from each container within the tight space of the glove box; “poor control” of zeolite to the extent that some material had to be reprocessed; and multiple procedural issues, some of which involved pauses in operations.
Each drum treated results in eight to 10 new drums of waste, Kovac said, as three parts of new zeolite and one part water are added to one part nitrate salt in the original container.
Once the remediated-waste barrels are treated, workers will process 29 drums of unremediated material.
Asked Monday for an update on the treatment program, including measures being taken to address the problems identified by the DNFSB, DOE’s Environmental Management Los Alamos (EMLA) Field Office referred questions to department headquarters, which did not respond.
Along with WCRRF, Kovac said Wednesday’s tour organized by EMLA also stopped at LANL’s Area G waste management facility and PermaCon building, where the nitrate-salt containers are stored. “It was good to see this process underway with such focused workers,” he said.
