The legacy cleanup contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in August plans to start the site’s largest radioactive waste extraction effort in more than a decade, a company executive told a federal advisory board Thursday.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) vice president Joe Legare said in August the contractor will start digging up old corrugated metal pipes that “happen to be filled with cemented radioactive waste.”
“They weigh about five Camrys, five Toyota Camrys [or] 14,000 pounds,” Legare told the Northern New Mexico Environmental Management Advisory Board, during a hybrid meeting. The pipes will be excavated, cut up and eventually treated, packaged and shipped as transuranic waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
Legare and federal officials said this represents DOE’s largest radioactive waste excavation project in about 15 years.
The work within Area G falls under the Solid Waste Stabilization and Disposition line item in the Los Alamos budget, which DOE is seeking $116 million for during fiscal 2023, up from $102 million in fiscal 2022.
DOE will commence the retrieval process of 158 corrugated metal pipes this fiscal year within Technical Area 54 of Area G, an agency spokesperson said in a Thursday email. The retrievals, size-reduction, characterization and packaging for shipment,” should be done by March 30, 2024, the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, the legacy cleanup contractor has held job fairs and is working to fill openings, due to retirements and attrition, Legare said. It has to compete both with DOE’s lab management prime Triad National Security and other options, he added.
“Triad certainly is the big brother across the bridge … they have more openings, three times more openings, than we have people,” Legare said. “But we don’t just compete with Triad.” N3B also vies for workers with the likes of WalMart, Target and — thanks to telework — other entities in the DOE weapons complex, such as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, he said.
Keeping the existing workforce healthy and on-the-job is still tricky due to COVID, Legare said. “We have had quite a few workers out at all levels of the organizations with significant symptoms from this latest variant.”