National Nuclear Security Administration shipments of transuranic waste from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., remain suspended following a February drum sparking incident, a spokesperson for the disposal site said Wednesday.
“Shipments from LANL-NNSA [Los Alamos National Laboratory-National Nuclear Security Administration] remain paused,” a spokesperson for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said via email Wednesday.
The DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office temporarily halted shipments of transuranic waste from NNSA’s laboratory management contractor Triad National Security in March after the incident where sparks flew from a drum being packed at the Plutonium Facility-4 waste generator site at Technical Area 55 at Los Alamos. Workers pulled the fire alarm and evacuated the area.
In a June 10 speech to the Energy Facilities Contractors Group, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Chair Joyce Connery said the recent incident at Los Alamos is the third worrisome waste drum accident within the DOE weapons complex in recent years. In addition to the sparking drum and the 2014 radiation leak at WIPP, four radioactive sludge drums overheated in April 2018 and blew off their lids at a fabric filter building at the Idaho National Laboratory.
“The lack of public confidence that DOE suffers after each of these events” is greater than the impact on budget and schedules, Connery said.
The NNSA and Triad soon surmised the sparks occurred after metal waste tore a bag holding two high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. “When the bag tore during drum packing, air entered the bag and oxidized the metal powders on the HEPA filters, which caused the sparking,” according to a report filed with DOE in March.
A Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board update in April said crews at Los Alamos “did not recognize that welding titanium in an inert glovebox could result in the generation of potentially pyrophoric fume condensates” and neither waste managers for DOE or Triad “rejected the prohibited reactive titanium metal fines from the transuranic waste stream.”
The same DNFSB document suggests worker in the complex are still not doing enough to detect potentially flammable materials before they are packaged in a drum that could end up at WIPP. In a worst case, that could result in a repeat of the underground drum rupture and radiation leak in the WIPP underground during February 2014.The accident kept WIPP offline for about three years.
