During fiscal 2025, the legacy cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico shipped more than 190 cubic meters of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
That’s according to a quarterly update distributed Wednesday by Brad Smith, president and general manager of Newport News Nuclear-BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B). which is the DOE Office of Environmental Management cleanup contractor at the site.
“Thanks to our team’s excellent performance, we exceeded our shipping goal this year by more than 200 percent,” Smith said in a summary emailed to Exchange Monitor.
In addition, N3B also finished cutting down to size corrugated metal pipes dug up at Los Alamos’ Area G’s Technical Area 54. The concrete-filled pipes with radioactive material have been buried at Los Alamos since the 1980s.
New Mexico state officials continue to push DOE to increase the amount of defense-related transuranic waste being shipped from Los Alamos to WIPP.
N3B has been in charge of legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos since May 2018, Smith noted. N3B’s current contract, which runs through April 2026, is valued at about $2.27 billion, according to a DOE contract chart.