PHOENIX — The president of the legacy cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico expects her team will soon close out work on radioactive contamination found two years ago outside the fence along a public road.
Also, this year, the Hunting Ingalls-led joint venture will dig up some corrugated metals that will yield transuranic (TRU) waste, Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) president Kim Lebak told the Waste Management Symposia here in Phoenix.
The contractor might not fully conclude Middle DP Road activities, including filing a report with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) next month, Lebak said during a Wednesday panel presentation. But “we hope to have that project completed in the next few months.”
“There is a lot of hustle and bustle down there … with apartments going up,” not far from the Middle DP Road tract was some radioactive material unearthed in February 2020, Lebak said.
N3B finished its exhumation in late October along the parcel of land DOE had declared safe and transferred to Los Alamos County years earlier, said Troy Thomson, N3B’s environmental remediation program manager. The cleanup is done and the contractor completed its confirmatory sampling in January, Thomson said.
The exact origin of the radioactive contaminated soil remains a bit murky, Thompson added. N3B has been looking into the possibility that the 28-acre parcel might have been used for material disposal in the 1940s. The area was used for trailers to house Los Alamos workers during the 1950s, Thomson said.
As for the corrugated metal containing TRU waste in Area G, “we are very excited about that because that is buried waste we have not exhumed,” Lebak said. N3B tries to move about 30 shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad yearly. It does some joint shipments with Triad Nuclear Security, the Los Alamos Management contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Lebak said.
N3B is in the fourth year of what could be a 10-year tenure to remediate legacy, meaning pre-1999 wastes, at Los Alamos, Lebak said. While NMED and DOE have been litigating terms of a 2016 consent order on cleanup, it has not stopped or slowed N3B’s remediation work, Lebak said.
“I want to tell you we still get work done,” Lebak said. “The work did not stop when the litigation came into play.”
