An April 16 staff report by a federal watchdog questions if the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration have fully learned lessons stemming from a drum breach and radiation release that shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in February 2014.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) staff said a review team for Los Alamos National Laboratory management contractor Triad National Security believes “sparking” from a transuranic waste drum, which prompted evacuation of the Technical Area-55 Plutonium Facility-4 in late February, might have been avoided if more care was taken in welding, and if crews had removed prohibited titanium metal fines from the waste stream.
“In our opinion,” the early investigation also suggests more needs to be done to prevent repeats of the February drum breach and radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in 2014, DNFSB resident inspectors said in a one-page report to the board’s technical director Christopher Roscetti. The DNFSB has devoted much attention in the past couple of years studying drum ignitions at WIPP and a 2018 accident at Idaho National Laboratory.
The Triad review team that briefed managers from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said individuals overseeing the Feb. 26 work within Technical Area-55 “did not recognize that welding titanium in an inert glovebox could result in a heightened risk” of spontaneous ignition, according to the DNFSB document. Likewise, crews failed to remove the titanium fines from the transuranic waste steam, it adds.
The Los Alamos incident led the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico to suspend transuranic waste shipments from Technical Area-55 Plutonium Facility-4 pending an NNSA investigation. The analysis was not publicly available as of Wednesday afternoon. “The Carlsbad Field Office has not yet authorized the NNSA contractor to resume shipments from the part of Los Alamos where the drum sparking occurred,” a DOE spokesperson at Carlsbad said in a Wednesday email.
WIPP is still taking legacy transuranic waste from contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) shipped from the Radioassay and Nondestructive Testing facility at the laboratory, according to the DNFSB memo.
“The laboratory is pursuing a variety of corrective actions,” said a lab spokesperson in a Tuesday email. These include additional characterization steps aimed at detecting ignition hazards, ensuring material that might pose a combustion risk is safe before it leaves the glovebox and additional training, the spokesperson said.
