Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
11/7/2014
During the restart of a ventilation fan last month at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a very minor amount of radioactive contamination was detected outside of the mine. The release was not unexpected, and the amount detected is not believed to impact human health or the environment. On Oct. 21, contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership restarted the 860A fan to perform routine maintenance. That fan was put into service for about two months following the February radiation release to operate the filtration system that cleaned air from the underground before it was exhausted outside the mine. “So we had the potential to have some contamination in the ductwork and the internals of that fan,” NWP Deputy Recovery Project Manager Tammy Reynolds said this week at a Carlbad WIPP town hall meeting.
NWP undertook precautions and a methodical approach to restarting the fan “because we wanted to be sure that we were prepared if there were some particles had come loose during that evolution,” Reynolds said. “We were very pleased with the results of that. It was actually less than we had anticipated during that evolution, the switching of the fans only takes a few minutes. The whole evolution took less than 20 minutes to complete. We did not see any activity that was released from the exhaust stack that would have impacted personnel or the environment.”
A small amount of americium 241 was detected in an on-site air sampler a few hundred feet from the mine’s exhaust, Russell Hardy of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center said at the town hall. “At that sampler we saw one-tenth of a disintegration per second, so it’s a very small amount,” Hardy said, adding: “This is actually below our free release limits, which means that this filter could have been tossed in the trash or folded up and put in a lunch bucket…. What we saw is measurable, it’s there, but it’s very small and does not pose any concern to public health or the environment.”