The legacy cleanup contractor for the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico is seeking a firm to monitor vapor levels around certain disposal areas.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) on Monday issued an updated request for proposals at www.fbo.gov for a subcontractor to collect and report on material disposal area (MDA) vapor levels.
Bids on the two-year, firm-fixed-price contract are due by 3 p.m. Mountain time on Monday Sept. 23, by email to Contractor’s Representative Heather Evans at [email protected].
The contract award will be based on a combination of factors including technical compliance, experience, key personnel, and cost. N3B “will make the award that is most advantageous to the government by evaluating and comparing factors in addition to price,” according to the RFP.
The cleanup vendor could announce its contract award as soon as Oct. 7, with the first round of vapor sampling to start by the end of November.
The winning vendor will monitor vapor levels around MDA C and MDA L, as required by the New Mexico Environment Department, by collecting samples on a semiannual basis. The subcontractor will be looking for evidence of tritium and volatile organic compounds in the vapor samples.
There are more than two dozen MDAs at Los Alamos. Most hold waste in pits, trenches, and shafts.
The RFP did not cite a cost estimate for the project.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos in April 2018 began work on the 10-year, $1.38 billion legacy cleanup contract for Los Alamos. The contractor is charged with remediating hundreds of sites, including waste sites, waste disposal areas, and a groundwater chromium plume, and packaging and sending transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The Colorado Department of Health and Environment expects the organization building a toll road near Denver to continue soil sampling around the site of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility and to submit its results by the end of the year.
A soil sample taken by the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority in May near what is today the Rocky Flats Natural Wildlife Refuge turned up a plutonium level about five times higher than what is considered benign. The authority’s sampling is done around the right-of-way for a 10-mile toll road it is developing near metropolitan Denver.
“We will assess this data and determine any possible next steps to protect public health once we review all of these results,” Laura Dixon, a spokeswoman for the state agency’s Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division, said by email Tuesday.
But based on what is known today, including historic environmental samples and other available information, state experts and toxicologists do not believe there is an immediate public health threat, Dixon said.
Subsequent retesting of the soil sample showed far lower plutonium levels that were within safe limits of 50 picocuries per gram (pCi/g), according to Dixon.
Likewise, on Sept. 6, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a soil sampling report on planned hiking trails at the wildlife refuge. The federal agency said the refuge does not pose a risk to people who use the area for recreation, or for residents who live nearby.
“We believe that further soil sampling and analysis is needed to assess what this elevated Parkway sample may mean: whether it is an isolated instance, or a sign of a wider area of relatively high contamination,” Dixon said.
The health and environment department is not doing its own sampling, but will review results of the 250 samples being taken by the parkway authority.
Earlier this month, city of Broomfield, Colo., a participant in the parkway project, said it believes the road is on hold until the questions are cleared up about the radioactivity of the soil.
Between 1952 and 1989, Rocky Flats made plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. In 2005, the Energy Department certified it had completed the $7 billion remediation at the site.
