As it finishes digging for Manhattan Project-era contamination along a stretch of road by new housing developments, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is also putting finishing touches on a gameplan to deal with similar surprise contamination sites, a new report says.
In February 2020, a few years after the lab transferred a 28-acre parcel of land on DP Road to Los Alamos County, crews discovered radioactive contamination seven feet underground in the path of a planned sewer line. It turned out to be very early Manhattan Project plutonium and uranium, DOE said, possibly from World War II-era solid waste management units built during the Army’s drive to develop the world’s first nuclear weapons.
The different contractors who took turns managing the Los Alamos National Laboratory throughout the years mostly attempted to track down old waste management areas outside the fence by relying on lab records, according to the Novemebr 2021 report, Disposition of Excess Real Property Assessment at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, the DP road contamination was not accounted for in those records, the report said.
Now, Triad National Security, the current lab management and operations contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is assessing “the potential for similar conditions to exist on other conveyed tracts of land” beyond DP Road, the report said.
As of the report’s publication, the local NNSA field office on the mesa was still awaiting Triad’s findings, which the parties hope will end “the reliance on historical document reviews without additional or sufficient confirmatory field sampling” that led to the DP Road cleanup over a roughly two-year period.
In that time, Los Alamos cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos has dug 124 potholes to check for contamination, backfilling any radioactive materials it excavated with clean soil. By September, the work had turned up the equivalent of almost 10,000, 55-gallon drums worth of low-level radioactive waste.
Once the cleanup is finished, contractors for the county can continue installing sewer lines to service the almost-completed Canyon Walk Apartments and the planned Bluffs Senior Living Apartments on DP Road.
