The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has postponed its scheduled May 22 public hearing in Washington, D.C., on past radioactive waste accidents at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory and its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
In a notice on its website, the DNFSB said the half-day public hearing is being rescheduled “to maximize panelist participation.” A new date will be posted shortly, although it is not yet set, DNFSB General Manager Glenn Sklar said by email Friday. He declined to say how many or which of the eight suggested witnesses could not make attend the meeting next week.
Invitees include DOE Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White, Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader, and Idaho Cleanup Project Deputy Manager Jack Zimmerman.
The public hearing will focus on understanding the April 2018 radioactive-waste drum breach at INL, as well as the February 2014 underground radiological release that closed WIPP for nearly three years.
The WIPP accident involved an improperly remediated drum of TRU waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The site resumed waste emplacement in January 2017 and began taking shipments from other DOE properties three months later.
At the Idaho accident, four drums of waste overheated and blew off their lids hours after the contents were exposed to air during repackaging. The sludge waste, initially generated at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, was stored for decades at INL prior to repackaging. Fluor Idaho just started sludge waste repackaging at the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 facility.
The DNFSB wants to improve records used for transuranic waste facilities and strengthen federal subject matter expertise. The board also seeks to minimize the chance of any unwanted chemical reactions during waste handling operations.
On April 30, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) hit the one-year mark as the cleanup vendor for legacy waste at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
N3B is tasked with environmental remediation at the 34-square-mile federal property, along with preparing radioactive waste for disposal off-site. It sent the first shipment of defense transuranic waste from the lab’s Area G to the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in over four years, the contractor said in a May 1 press release.
Together with its subcontractors, N3B has a 600-person workforce. It awarded $41 million in procurements over the year, 82% of which went to small businesses.
During its first year, N3B sent six shipments of contact-handled TRU waste to WIPP; shipped another 435 cubic meters of waste off-site; completed 15 milestones under a longstanding consent order on cleanup with the state of New Mexico, and started 10 other remediation campaigns under the same settlement. The contractor also collected more than 4,100 samples of air, soil, and water for testing.
“We established a new company from scratch, completed several projects, resumed waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and laid the foundation for our goal of cleaning up the environment and protecting our future,” said N3B President Glenn Morgan in the press release.
The joint venture, owned by a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, and BWX Technologies, holds the 10-year, $1.38 billion contract at LANL. It replaced former incumbent Los Alamos National Security (LANS), which is also the former management and operations contractor at the nuclear-weapon lab.
In January, N3B earned roughly $2.4 million, or about 83%, of a potential $2.9 million in DOE fee for the period from April 30 through Sept. 30, 2018.
The Energy Department, possibly inching toward a draft solicitation, has posted a slew of documents related to the contract for environmental remediation at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.
More than 50 documents were posted Friday to the website for DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center. They encompass the labor pact in place for current cleanup contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) and its unionized workers, legal agreements, site maps, and DOE’s strategic plans for mercury remediation at the Y-12 National Security Complex.
In its last procurement schedule, issued in March, the DOE Office of Environmental Management indicated a draft request for proposals for a new contract could be issued by the end of this month. The same schedule suggested that would be followed by the final RFP in August, then the award before May 2020.
The new contract could be valued between $4 billion and $8 billion.
UCOR’s current decontamination and decommissioning contract is worth $2.7 billion and dates to August 2011. The contract, which is scheduled to expire in July 2020, includes remediation of the East Tennessee Technology Park, where a Manhattan Project-era uranium enrichment facility was located. The contractor is finishing demolition of ETTP buildings and beginning to focus more on work at Y-12 and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Volpentest Hazardous Materials and Emergency Response (HAMMER) Federal Training Center at the Hanford Site in Washington state has reached 2 million work hours without a lost workday injury, contractor Mission Support Alliance and the Department of Energy announced May 10.
The safety milestone took about eight years to achieve. It was reached as the training center manages its highest volume of students since 2011, when hiring funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act increased the Hanford workforce. It is also undergoing staff transitions and ensuring safety culture and values are instilled in new employees as Paul Vandervert has taken over as director after the 2018 retirement of longtime center director Karen McGinnis.
HAMMER provides training for Hanford Site workers in areas such as electrical safety, respiratory protection, and emergency response. It also serves other federal customers from across the nation.
