Los Alamos National Laboratory prime contractor Los Alamos National Security has prohibited access to potentially explosive containers of tritium waste at the Area G waste management area, according to a recently published report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
Reached by email Wednesday, lab spokesman Peter Hyde said he could not reply to questions about the status of the tritium drums by deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
In early September, lab personnel discovered that “several Flanged Tritium Waste Containers may be pressurized with an explosive mixture of hydrogen isotopes and oxygen,” according to a Sept. 9 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) report uploaded to the agency’s website last week.
In a Sept. 16 report released this week, DNFSB said Los Alamos personnel were, as of mid-September, still developing a safety evaluation for the situation, and that the containers remained off-limits.
It was unclear Wednesday evening what effect, if any, the complications with the tritium barrels would have on the timetable for treating a separate Los Alamos waste stream: improperly remediated nitrate salts that are also stored at LANL Area G. The nitrate salts are similar to the waste that in 2014 leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., and shut that facility down.
At an industry conference on Sept. 15 — by which time the problematic tritium barrels had come to DNFSB’s attention — Doug Hintze, manager of DOE Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office, said the nitrate salts would be cleaned up by next summer and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant some time between 2018 and 2022.
An early step in that process is moving the nitrate salt waste to the lab’s Waste Characterization, Reduction and Repackaging Facility for treatment. Los Alamos National Security finished its contractor readiness review for the treatment regimen in September, according to this week’s DNFSB report, but the DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration must finish its own readiness review before the agency and its contractor pull the trigger on the process.
