Crews handling legacy cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory were relieved last summer to find an underground chromium plume remained static during three months of bare bones operations due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“One of our concerns was the possibility of plume rebound,” where it might drift closer to local drinking water supplies, Danny Katzman chief scientist of the Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) water program, told the online Waste Management Symposia Wednesday.
At the direction of DOE, N3B’s cleanup operations at Los Alamos scaled back to essential operations on March 27, 2020 due to the pandemic, Katzman said.
N3B took about three days to move most of its 600-person staff to remote in late March of last year when DOE issued the partial suspension of operations for operations, said Joe LeGare, vice president and executive officer at the joint venture.
About a third of N3B’s office staff returned on-site when Los Alamos entered Phase 1 of DOE’s restart plan last year. But in September N3B resumed maximum telework after cases spiked in New Mexico, he said.
The chromium plume was discovered in 2005 about 1,000 feet below the surface. As an interim solution, N3B employs a combination of injection wells and extraction wells to control the size of the plume and keep it from reaching the Los Alamos County water supply, Katzman said.
The local canyons and rugged terrain make the drilling for the wells difficult and expensive, Katzman said.
Another high-profile remediation issue at Los Alamos is the February 2020 discovery of contamination unearthed alongside a public road on land that DOE had transferred to Los Alamos County a few years ago. The land, sometimes called the DP Road site, was supposed to have been fully remediated.
N3B will perform the field work at the DP Road site this year, Katzman said. The contractor is currently addressing comments that the New Mexico Environment Department made on the DOE remediation plan, he added.
The Huntington Ingalls Industries-led team was awarded a 10-year $1.4-billion legacy remediation contract in December 2017. There is industry talk, however, DOE might end its relationship with N3B in 2023 when the five-year base period expires.
