The Department of Energy’s legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico should finish its “readiness assessment” by the end of March for slicing up corrugated metal pipes, a spokesperson said Thursday.
After that, a required federal readiness assessment will start, the spokesperson said in an email to Exchange Monitor. “Corrugated metal pipe size reduction is expected to begin in June 2023 and conclude by March 2024.”
Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) began unearthing the buried corrugated metal pipes containing radioactive waste last September. In mid-January, a 12-member N3B team began the assessment on planned size reduction work at Area G’s Dome 375, according to a staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Non-corrugated metal pipe size reduction was last done there in May 2014, and “nuclear operations other than the movement and storage of waste containers have not been performed in the dome since November 2017,” according to the board report.
During a Thursday night public briefing on Los Alamos cleanup, N3B’s president and general manager, Kim Lebak, said the pipes must be cut up in order to fit into waste containers for eventual shipment as transuranic waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
“Think of a cigar cutter that takes a 20-foot-long corrugated metal pipe that’s akin to something that might be in your driveway or a construction site,” Lebak said during the Thursday public meeting. The pipes will go into this “shearer device” and cut it into smaller pieces.
Digging up the 158 corrugated metal pipes, weighing a combined 14,000 pounds, has been deemed by N3B as the biggest waste excavation project at Los Alamos in more than a decade.
The pipe project got off to a rocky start safety-wise when a worker for N3B suffered “heat stress,” Lebak said. While the worker had no long-term ramifications, such heat illness can be serious, she said. The heat illness and other minor mishaps led the contractor to temporarily suspend much of its field work last October.
The Defense Facilities Safety Board quizzed Lebak about N3B safety during a Los Alamos area meeting last fall.
In addition, the DOE Office of Enforcement, which investigates “abnormal events,” was onsite at Los Alamos last week to examine safety practices and procedures, LeBak said. “They will go off and study their information and it is possible we will hear from them in the future.”
Separately, N3B and the Los Alamos Environmental Management office arranged for Oak Ridge Associated Universities to do safety surveys and conduct focus groups with staff, Lebak said. This organization will bring a fresh set of eyes to safety at Los Alamos, she added.
