The Department of Energy granted a request by Los Alamos National Laboratory’ cleanup contractor in New Mexico to resume “drilling and draining” containers with free liquids to prepare them for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an agency spokesperson said Sept. 2.
DOE has also endorsed plans by Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) to begin its project to dig up corrugated metals pipes buried at Area G in the lab’s Technical Area 54, the spokesperson said. The pipes are filled with cemented radioactive waste.
Eventually, the corrugated metal pipes will be reduced in size, packaged and shipped as transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, according to DOE. It is considered the biggest waste excavation project at Los Alamos in years.
The DOE spokesperson last week was replying to an ExchangeMonitor inquiry about certain Area G work temporarily delayed or limited by the agency while the contractor addresses safety questions there. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board recently told DOE that resolving the Area G issues should be a priority at Los Alamos.
Certain work was put on hold when cleanup contractor N3B self-identified potential inadequacies during its safety analysis in January 2020, the spokesperson said in the Friday email.
In addition to the corrugated metal pipe retrieval and drilling and draining transuranic waste containers, other work put on hold included “initiation of the glove bag processing line, a process to safely sort, segregate and repackage legacy waste for shipment,” the spokesperson said.
Once the potential safety inadequacies were discovered, “N3B addressed them by implementing the proper controls to mitigate hazards, creating procedures for those controls and training its workforce on the procedures,” the spokesperson said.
Two areas where N3B has not yet received DOE authorization to proceed are the metal pipe size reduction work and glove bag processing line, although “N3B is in the process of demonstrating readiness” to the agency, the spokesperson said.
The work limits have not stopped Los Alamos shipments to WIPP of transuranic waste stored above ground, the spokesperson said. The DOE’s public website for WIPP indicates Los Alamos sent 100 shipments to the underground salt mine from Jan. 1, 2021 through mid-August 2022.
