The legacy cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has excavated most of the corrugated metal pipes buried at a material disposal area and sliced up more than half of the pipes, a federal advisory board heard last week.
As of early last week, Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) had dug up 124 of the 158 corrugated metal pipes buried at Technical Area -54’s Area G since the 1980s, Troy Thomson, the contractor’s manager of environmental remediation, said July 31.
In addition, Thompson told the Northern New Mexico Citizens Advisory Board that 84 of the pipes dug up so far have been cut up into segments that can fit into a standard waste box. This will prepare the pipes for eventual shipment as transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., he said.
DOE has said one of these pipes can weigh between 10,000 and 14,000 pounds. Once dug up, the pipes are cut up and treated inside a “dome” or modular containment structure on the surface, Thompson said.
Earlier in July, work was stopped temporarily due to shutdown of ventilation fans inside one such dome, possibly due to electrical storms, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a staff report dated July 12. The stop work order, instituted July 9, was lifted July 19, DOE spokesperson said Aug. 1.
A new procedure requires “a work pause when inclement weather is detected in the area,” the spokesperson said in an email to Exchange Monitor. Also, the ventilation system has been programmed so that a fan automatically restarts after a power-related trip, the spokesperson said.
N3B started digging up the pipes in September 2022 and DOE has called the project the most significant waste retrieval at Los Alamos in years.
