The legacy waste cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has resumed excavating corrugated metal pipe after suspending work in August because of missing paperwork, a company official told a federal advisory board Wednesday.
“Gaps in paperwork” for training were found and, as a result, a “stop work” order was instituted last month, Brad Smith, president and general manager of Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), told the Northern New Mexico Citizens Advisory Board meeting.
“If you are driving on an expired license, you might be proficient but in accordance with the law you are not exactly totally legal,” Smith said.
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board reported suspension of field work in Technical Area 21 and the discrepancies in the training records in a report dated Aug. 18. Work resumed last week, Smith told the board this week.
“When we couldn’t demonstrate compliance, we took that time out,” which lasted over three weeks, he said. N3B is tapping into support from corporate parents Huntington Ingalls International and BWX Technologies to do “a corporate deep dive” into practices and procedures, Smith said.
Earlier this year, DOE extended N3B for another three years at Los Alamos in spite of some prior stop work orders by N3B. Smith became the new top boss at N3B in June, replacing Kim Lebak, took a corporate job with Huntington Ingalls.
N3B started excavating the corrugated metal pipes, filled with cemented radioactive waste, in September 2022. The work includes, digging up the pipes, cutting up the 20-foot-long pipes into smaller segments and preparing the material for shipment and disposal as transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
N3B began its legacy cleanup contract in April 2018 after DOE decided to separate the lab’s nuclear remediation work from the Los Alamos operations contract, previously held by Los Alamos National Security and now held by Triad National Security. The N3B contract is currently valued at $1.8 billion and scheduled to run through April 2026.
