PHOENIX — The Los Alamos National Laboratory expects next month to begin treating 60 drums that contain a combustible mix of nitrate salts and kitty litter like the one that burst open and released a small amount of radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2014, officials said here Monday.
The incident closed the transuranic waste storage site for nearly three years, and the Department of Energy has since then been working to ensure there is no repeat occurrence involving the containers still stored at Los Alamos.
That has involved a significant amount of research into the roles temperature and pressure played in the WIPP event, and then mitigation measures including relieving the pressure in the LANL containers, said Randall Erickson, the northern New Mexico lab’s associate director for environmental programs.
“Although we’ve done everything reasonable we’re still interested in getting this material treated as soon as possible, but we want to make sure the treatment is done safely and compliantly, with full coordination with the TRU waste program,” Erickson said during a panel discussion here at the annual Waste Management Symposium.
Investigations after the WIPP incident determined that a subcontractor at Los Alamos had erroneously packaged the kitty litter with the nitrate salts. The lab researched a number of means for treating the waste, ultimately determining that the best option is to add water and an inert substance – zeolite – so that the mixture is no longer combustible, Erickson said.
A federal readiness review was scheduled to begin Monday for the project, which will involve transporting the waste drums 4 miles from the laboratory’s Area G to the Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility (WCRRF) for processing. Once at WCRRF, workers will use a glove box to remove the material from the container and mix it with the zeolite. The nitrate salts will then be repackaged for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, alongside 2,000 other transuranic waste containers at Los Alamos that did not pose the same threat.
The federal evaluation is the last administrative hurdle to the treatment program: The state of New Mexico in 2016 approved a modification to the site permit allowing the processing, and the plan has already gone through a management self-evaluation and contractor assessment, according to Erickson. Lab personnel have also used a replica of the glove box to train on the procedure.
After the laboratory makes any changes to the plan mandated by the federal assessment, treatment should begin in mid-April and wrap up in late June or early July, officials said. The full cost of the project was not immediately known.
The schedule for shipping LANL waste to WIPP remains somewhat vague. The storage site near Carlsbad, N.M., anticipates beginning accepting waste shipments from other DOE sites in April. But LANL is at the end of the recently released shortlist of five facilities that will send over material first: behind privately operated Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and DOE’s Idaho, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge sites.
Meanwhile, DOE is due by the end of the year to complete a feasibility study for treatment of another 113 drums of the same waste mix now held at the private WCS complex in West Texas, said Doug Hintze, manager of the DOE Environmental Management Field Office at Los Alamos.
One question there is whether the waste will be treated on site or transported back to Los Alamos for processing, Hintze said.
LANL EM Staffing
Hintze also aired concerns about staffing levels at his office. The lab’s Environmental Management Field Office was established in March 2015, taking over environmental restoration and legacy waste management oversight previously held by the lab’s National Nuclear Security Administration Field Office.
The office was authorized for 41 federal workers in an office of roughly 65 people, with contractors filling the rest of the spots. It currently has 24 federal employees, and the hiring freeze instituted by the Trump administration in January means the odds are against any near term increases in staffing, Hintze said.
“So what does that mean, is I don’t necessarily have the staff that I’m supposed to have,” Hintze said, citing possible effects on quality assurance and industrial hygiene at the laboratory. He did not elaborate on the potential impacts of the staffing situation; the LANL EM office referred questions on the matter to Environmental Management headquarters in Washington, D.C., which had not responded by deadline.
