On Nov. 17, the legacy cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico lifted a month-long stop work order issued after a steady drip of small mishaps, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) fully lifted the “self-imposed stop work order” last week after allowing some field activities to resume on a piecemeal basis last month, a spokesperson for the contractor said in an email response to Exchange Monitor.
N3B president and program manager Kim Lebak stopped work on Oct. 13 following a number of trips, slips and falls during August and September, which she feared might signal some more serious accidents down the road.
Lebak also discussed the stop work order last week during a hearing on Los Alamos issues by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in Santa Fe, N.M. “A trite expression is ‘go slow to go fast,’” Lebak said of the decision to delay some work while brushing up on safety.
N3B did not like the trends it was seeing in its safety data, Lebak said at the hearing.
In addition to a “heat-stress” illness during the start of excavation of corrugated metal pipes, there were also “head bumps” and other mishaps, the N3B manager said. So “let’s take a stop here and go back and look at our processes and procedures,” Lebak said.
Some follow-up safety actions will continue over the next several weeks, Lebak said. The manager did not specify what this might include.
During last week’s hearing, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board chair Joyce Connery, vice chair Thomas Summers and member Jessie Hill Roberson said both contractor N3B and the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management field office at Los Alamos need to do more to address safety concerns.
An October 2020 DOE safety report found the field office’s documented oversight of safety basis control and implementation of nuclear safety was “less than adequate,” according to the board’s slide presentation at the hearing.
Both Lebak and Michael Mikolanis, who runs the site’s Environmental Management field office, said filling staffing holes is part of the challenge at Los Alamos.
