A joint venture between Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) and BWX Technologies said Tuesday it is meeting its goals for moving legacy transuranic waste from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
“This fiscal year has been N3B’s most productive year in reducing legacy transuranic waste inventories since our contract began in 2018,” said Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) President and General Manager Brad Smith in a quarterly update emailed to Exchange Monitor.
“As of the end of June, we have completed 64 shipments and transported almost 300 cubic meters of legacy transuranic waste” to WIPP, Smith said in the update. “Since we began our work in 2018, we have disposed of more than 1,100 cubic meters of legacy transuranic waste and disposed of more than 16,000 cubic meters of low-level and mixed low-level waste,” he went on to say.
N3B has a $2.3-billion contract for legacy waste remediation at Los Alamos, which started in April 2018 and is currently slated to run through April 2029, according to a June DOE Office of Environmental Management contract summary. DOE issued a draft request for proposals in February as it started working toward a follow-on contract.
The New Mexico Environment Department is again pressing DOE to increase the rate of legacy transuranic waste shipments from Los Alamos to WIPP.