The Department of Energy will apply a little extra scrutiny to a worker’s heat exhaustion during legacy nuclear waste cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments said recently.
The worker “experienced heat exhaustion while supporting corrugated metal pipe retrieval operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on September 8, 2022,” the office wrote in a Nov. 22 letter to former fed Kimberly Lebak, now president and general manager of Newport News Nuclear BWXT (N3B) Los Alamos, the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s nuclear-cleanup contractor at the lab.
N3B reported the event to DOE, outing itself for some apparent non-compliances in the process, according to the Office of Enterprise Assessments’ letter.
The worker heat-exhaustion happened around the same time that a number of trips, slips and falls at the lab prompted Lebak in October to halt N3B’s cleanup work at Los Alamos. The contractor lifted the stop-work order a week before Thanksgiving, a spokesperson told the Exchange Monitor before the holiday.
