Representatives of the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup field office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told the Northern New Mexico Advisory Board Monday the legacy waste contractor has started digging up corrugated metal pipes at Area G.
In addition, the DOE’s Environmental Management field office should produce a strategic plan within the next 15 months to help guide future Los Alamos remediation, said field office boss Michael Mikolanis.
“We are a young field office,” and have a different role than DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the national laboratory and its nuclear weapons mission, Mikolanis said.
The buried corrugated metal pipes, filled with cemented radioactive waste, were generated in the mid-to-late 1970s, said Ellen Gammon, an engineering and waste manager for cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B).
The excavation of the 20-foot-long pipes started recently and by June 2023, the contractor will start cutting the pipes down to size using shears at Dome 375, Gammon said. The pipes will be cut into four-foot segments in order to fit into standard waste boxes and preparation for ultimate shipment as transuranic waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
On the strategic plan, Mikolanis said the Environmental Field office is reaching out to tribes, civic clubs and virtually anyone who tunes into the advisory board’s regular meetings. The effort should help the field office develop “a rolling 5-year work plan.”
The job will be complicated, some advisory board members said, because many community people don’t distinguish between the Environmental Management office and its responsibility for radioactive and hazardous waste generated by 1999, and NNSA’s responsibility for waste that’s a byproduct of ongoing nuclear weapons work at the lab.
