About a year after the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) stood up a field office at the 70-year-old nuclear-weapons lab, the agency has launched a dedicated website for legacy nuclear cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
The Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office (EM-LA) website is located here, and brings legacy waste cleanup activities at the lab to the fore. The efforts managed by the EM-LA were previously buried on the main LANL website, which typically downplays the lab’s work for the Pentagon and pushes stories about science and research to the front.
The Office of Environmental Management also teased more regular updates about LANL cleanup on the dedicated waste management site, which enables “sharing our progress with our stakeholders and keeping them informed with regular updates,” EM-LA Field Office Manager Doug Hintze said in the press release.
DOE also said the move will save money.
“Transitioning numerous office and field site websites to a single platform is expected to help DOE avoid $10 million in costs annually while improving and integrating the Department’s communications infrastructure,” the agency said in its release.
LANL prime contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a partnership led by Bechtel and the University of California, is managing legacy waste cleanup at the site under a so-called bridge contract with EM potentially worth some $310 million through Sept. 30, 2017.
That work used to be bundled in with LANS’ lab management and operations contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration, but DOE shifted responsibility for the cleanup from the NNSA to EM after a 2014 radiation release at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., was traced to an improperly sealed waste container that originated at LANL.
In March, a senior DOE procurement official said the draft solicitation for the permanent cleanup contract that will replace LANS’ bridge pact would arrive by April. That draft document has not yet been released.
