The Energy Department said its effort to clean up potentially explosive transuranic waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was slowed again last week after the site’s contractor discovered a possible crack in a machine vital to the project.
On May 8, workers at the lab’s Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility (WCRRF) were preparing to practice waste treatment procedures with a dummy waste barrel when they discovered the possible crack during a routine inspection of a drum lift: the device used to hoist the barrels off the floor and move them to a glove box where workers can examine and treat their irradiated contents.
That is according to a notice Thursday from the official DOE Occurrence Reporting and Processing System.
According to that notice, the machine was taken out of service even though Los Alamos personnel “could not determine if the crack was in the holding band weld or just in the paint” coating the band. The holding band secures the drum to the lift. After workers discovered the crack, they temporarily placed the WCRRF in cold standby, halting the day’s work to deal with the potentially balky equipment.
The waste stream being managed is known as remediated nitrate salts. The barrels contain a mixture of irradiated nitrate salts and organic cat litter mistakenly added to the waste as a drying agent by a Los Alamos subcontractor.
One of these potentially explosive barrels in 2014 was placed the underground of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant further south in New Mexico, where a reaction between the organic material and the salts caused an explosion that leaked radiation and shut the repository down for almost three years.
DOE had once expected to start treating nitrate salts at the Los Alamos WCRRF as early as April 19 but was as of last week still practicing the treatment, according to the May 11 notice. Late last month, a unidentified Los Alamos official told the local Sante Fe New Mexican newspaper that nitrate salt treatment would begin sometime this month.
