Los Alamos NNSA Shipments to WIPP Still Suspended

June 17, 2021
By Exchange Monitor

National Nuclear Security Administration shipments of transuranic waste from the Department of Energy’s LosAlamos National Laboratory to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., remain suspendedfollowing a February drum sparking incident, a spokesperson for the disposal site said Wednesday.

“Shipments from LANL-NNSA [Los Alamos National Laboratory-National Nuclear Security Administration]remain paused,” a spokesperson for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) prime contractor Nuclear WastePartnership said via email Wednesday.

The DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office temporarily halted shipments of transuranic waste from NNSA’s laboratorymanagement contractor Triad National Security in March after the incident where sparks flew from a drumbeing packed at the Plutonium Facility-4 waste generator site at Technical Area 55 at Los Alamos. Workerspulled the fire alarm and evacuated the area.

In a June 10 speech to the Energy Facilities Contractors Group, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board ChairJoyce Connery said the recent incident at Los Alamos is the third worrisome waste drum accident within theDOE weapons complex in recent years. In addition to the sparking drum and the 2014 radiation leak at WIPP,four radioactive sludge drums overheated in April 2018 and blew off their lids at a fabric filter building at theIdaho National Laboratory.

“The lack of public confidence that DOE suffers after each of these events” is greater than the impact on budgetand schedules, Connery said.

The NNSA and Triad soon surmised the sparks occurred after metal waste tore a bag holding two high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. “When the bag tore during drum packing, air entered the bag andoxidized the metal powders on the HEPA filters, which caused the sparking,” according to a report filed withDOE in March.

A Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board update in April said crews at Los Alamos “did not recognize thatwelding titanium in an inert glovebox could result in the generation of potentially pyrophoric fumecondensates” and neither waste managers for DOE or Triad “rejected the prohibited reactive titanium metalfines from the transuranic waste stream.”

The same DNFSB document suggests worker in the complex are still not doing enough to detect potentiallyflammable materials before they are packaged in a drum that could end up at WIPP. In a worst case, that couldresult in a repeat of the underground drum rupture and radiation leak in the WIPP underground duringFebruary 2014.The accident kept WIPP offline for about three years.