Moniz Still Confident WIPP Will Reopen in December
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. should reopen in December as scheduled, DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz told Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) in a Thursday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“We believe we are on schedule for safely restarting operations later this year,” Moniz said after Heinrich asked if the restart was on schedule.
Recovery operations are still on hold in parts of WIPP, a spokesperson from DOE’s prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, said Friday. The company detected high levels of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the northeast and southern corridors of the underground facility, and evacuated workers from those areas Feb. 29.
In a statement emailed Monday to the Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said “while we believe a WIPP reopening in December 2016 is a realistic goal, our top priority is protecting the health and safety of the men and women who work at the facility and we will only allow operations to resume when we are satisfied that it is safe to do so.”
WIPP has been closed to new shipments of so-called transuranic waste — equipment and material contaminated by radioactive elements — since an underground fire and unrelated radiation release in 2014.
Also at the Thursday hearing, Moniz told Heinrich DOE hopes soon to see at least a draft of a new consent agreement with New Mexico governing cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the northern part of the state.
Moniz said DOE is in “very active negotiations with the state and we are hoping that in the reasonably near future that [the consent order] will be completed, at least for comment, and that we will then be in a position to adjust appropriately our long range cleanup plan.”
In January, an official with the New Mexico Environment Department said the state could produce a draft by April or May.
Lockheed Coughs Up $5M in Paducah Whistleblower Settlement
Lockheed Martin paid $5 million to settle whistleblower allegations the company mishandled nuclear waste at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Paducah, Ky., a uranium enrichment facility the company once operated for the U.S. government for about 15 years, the Department of Justice said Monday.
The government’s lawsuit alleged Lockheed Martin violated a key 1976 law about hazardous waste management “by failing to identify and report hazardous waste produced and stored at the facility, and failing to properly handle and dispose of the waste,” according to a DOJ a press release. Lockheed then falsely claimed it had adhered to the law and claimed payment for the waste-handling work under its contract with the Energy Department, the Justice Department said.
Lockheed Martin heritage companies operated the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant under contracts with the Department of Energy and the government-owned U.S. Enrichment Corp. — now the private company Centrus Energy — from 1984 to 1999.
The whistleblower case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky on 1999 under the False Claims Act by former Lockheed employees and a Washington-based nonprofit, the Natural Resources Defense Council. In false claims cases, whistleblowers may file on the government’s behalf, and the government may later join the case. The U.S. attorney for Western Kentucky did so in 2003.
The former Lockheed employees who blew the whistle will receive $920,000 of the $5 million settlement, in which Lockheed admitted no wrongdoing, the Justice Department said.
In a 10-K report filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lockheed said it is settling the case to prevent additional legal expense but does not admit liability or misconduct.
SRR Hits Halfway Mark on Tank 12 at Savannah River
The Energy Department is about halfway through a major cleanup step for a 750,000-gallon waste tank at the Savannah River Site, which federal law requires the agency to fill with cement-like grout by May 31.
Tank 12, one of the last to be taken out of service at the Aiken, S.C., site’s H-Area by contractor Savannah River Remediation, is just over half full, with some 490,000 gallons of grout poured in since January, DOE said Feb. 24. It takes about three months to fill up the entire tank, according to a press release. The tank was supposed to be filled by now, but DOE renegotiated its deadlines with Environmental Protection Agency to delay the end of the job until later this year.
DOE’s cleanup regimen calls for leaving some liquid waste inside the tanks. To decrease the possibility of this waste spreading beyond the tanks, it is mixed into grout. The tanks at Savannah River’s H-Area were built in the 1950s to temporarily store liquid waste from plutonium production until the U.S. decided on a permanent storage site — which so far it has not.
Awarded in 2008, Savannah River Remediation’s liquid-waste cleanup contract is worth roughly $4 billion through June 2017. DOE picked up a two-year, $800 million option on the deal last year. The contractor is a partnership comprising AECOM, Bechtel National, CH2M, and BWX Technologies.