Wrap Up: West Valley intertwined with Cold War; N3B pipe digging to resume; Hanford employee douses small fire

The origins of what became the West Valley Demonstration Project in Western New York can be traced back to 1949 when the then-Soviet Union held its first successful nuclear weapons test, Craig Rieman, a Department of Energy deputy manager at the site told a Waste Management Symposia panel Thursday in Phoenix.

“That was a big deal because nobody knew the Russians had an atomic bomb,” Rieman said. So, in the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission started looking to private industry for a nuclear fuel recycling facility. In the early 1960s, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R) targeted a large swath of land in Cattaraugus County to set up the Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing plant, Rieman said. The plant reprocessed 640 metric tons of spent fuel between 1966 and 1971, according to DOE. Nuclear Fuel Services stopped reprocessing in 1972 in order to make plant upgrades, but later decided to close it after concluding new federal regulations would increase the cost of modifications to $600 million from $15 million, Rieman said.

Today the site is owned by the site of New York but DOE has responsibility for cleanup. On Feb. 16, DOE issued a request for information  for contractors interested in performing Phase 1B remediation of West Valley, located 35 miles outside of Buffalo. 

Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) lifted a stop work order issued Jan. 26 concerning excavation of corrugated metal pipes within Area G of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a contractor spokesperson said by email Thursday.

“Crews are currently repairing a minor issue with the equipment used for retrieving [corrugated metal pipes] and retrievals will resume once that repair is complete,” the spokesperson said in the email to Exchange Monitor. N3B workers have completed a series of new soil tests intended to justify that the existing slope of the excavation is acceptable, according to a staff report dated Feb. 10 from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.  

The 20-foot-long pipes holding radioactive waste will be dug up, cut down to size, placed into waste boxes and eventually shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant as transuranic waste. 

A worker at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state used a fire extinguisher to snuff out a small blaze within an administrative office at 242-A Evaporator facility, a federal safety board reported Feb. 3.

An initial investigation identified the cause as “a lit candle that ignited combustible material while briefly left unattended,” according to the regular weekly staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).

Amentum-led contractor Washington River Protection Solutions is doing additional investigation and auditing workspaces for similar hazards, according to the DNFSB report. A sprinkler system at the building is not currently operational due to maintenance, according to a DOE spokesperson. Regular fire watches are taking place every four hours, the spokesperson added.