New Mexico and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Safety Administration (the agency’s mammoth weapons program) are in a dispute over cleanup of nuclear weapons waste at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. NNSA wants to cap and backfill unlined pits and shafts filled with liquid radioactive and chemical legacy wastes from the weapons program, in a $12 million project. New Mexico’s Environment Department wants the bomb building agency to excavate the site, which the state argues is the permanent solution to the pollution, at a cost of $805 million.
According to a filing by New Mexico, the waste site, known as Area C, shut down in 1974, “is an 11.8-acre landfill consisting of 115 subsurface waste disposal units (7 pits and 108 shafts).” According to the filing, the pits and shafts “were reported to dispose of solid wastes containing hazardous waste, uncontaminated classified materials, and low-level waste.” The inactive disposal sites contain a variety of chemical and radiological wastes including, among others, plutonium, uranium, tritium, sulfuric acid, cyanide, americium-241, mercury, radium-226, acids, lead, and waste oil. NNSA estimates that Area C holds some 190,000 cubic yards of mixed waste,
The Sante Fe New Mexican reports that DOE “environmental managers contend covering the dumpsite in Area C with a 2-foot-thick, rock-and-dirt cap would not only be far less costly but also would be safer for workers, the environment and the community than digging up waste with radioactive material mixed in.” The agency says about 240,000 cubic yards of material would have to be removed if the waste were excavated.
In its environmental analysis of the project, NNSA examine four alternatives, three of which were variants of caping and covering the site, and long-term monitoring. The fourth was excavation. The state argues for the fourth alternative. A DOE spokeswoman told the New Mexican in an email that the recommended alternative of cap and cover “would be protective of the health and safety of site workers, the environment and the public, including those who may live near, or use, the transportation routes that would be needed to dispose of excavated material. It also utilizes techniques that have been successfully used at dozens of landfill sites in the arid environment of the Southwest, and at Los Alamos.”
The state says that covering the site would leave a threat of groundwater contamination and require monitoring, while excavating the Area C would eliminate that threat and, if done properly, not pose a threat the remediation workers. The environment department argues that “long-term maintenance under the other alternatives cannot be assured after the 100-year institutional control period,” and would “be likely to require additional corrective measures following the 100-year institutional control period.” The state also argues that the three cap-and-cover alternatives cover are deficient “in preventing the intrusion of deep-rooting plants and burrowing animals over the lifetime of the” monitoring.
Where the excavated wastes would go is an open question, depending in large part on characterization of the wastes after they have surfaced. Much of the material is likely to end up in DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project salt bed waste site in Carlsbad, N.M.
At the same time as DOE and New Mexico are squabbling over Los Alamos legacy wastes, NNSA is gearing up to start new LANL production of up to 30 plutonium pits (aka “cores”) annually. As part of what it describes as “modernizing” it weapons production program, NNSA is resuming pit production, which is says is “a capability lost when the Rocky Flats Plant [outside Denver] ceased production in 1989.”
NNSA describes a plutonium pit as “a hollow sphere of plutonium that, when uniformly compressed by explosives inside a warhead or bomb, causes a nuclear explosion.” Los Alamos produced the first pits in 1945, for the Manhattan Project. According to NNSA, Los Alamos has done limited pit production for research purposes and, from 2007 to 2011, to replace the pits in 31 W88 warheads (these warheads are carried on submarine-launched missiles). From 1952-1989, Rocky Flats produced most of the plutonium pits. Since then, “Los Alamos has done limited pit production for research purposes and, from 2007 to 2011, to replace the pits in 31 W88 warheads (these warheads are carried on submarine-launched missiles).”
The new plutonium pit production has caused a hiring and real estate boom in Los Alamos, according to the Associated Press: “Some 3,300 workers have been hired in the last two years, with the workforce now topping more than 17,270. Close to half of them commute to work from elsewhere in northern New Mexico and from as far away as Albuquerque, helping to nearly double Los Alamos’ population during the work week.”
NNSA also plans to produce 80 of the new bomb cores annually at its Savannah River, South Carolina, plant, which now houses the failed, $6 billion Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility to downblend highly-enriched weapons uranium to low-enriched civilian reactor fuel (which wags had dubbed “uranium impoverishment”). Sen Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.) and the state’s congressional delegation successfully lobbied the Trump DOE to locate the new pit production at Savannah River. Savannah River has never produced plutonium pits.
In an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, physicists Curtis Asplund and Frank von Hipple write that NNSA’s cost estimate for the Savannah River pit project “has already risen from $3.6 billion in 2017 for an 80 pit-per-year production capacity to $11.1 billion for a 50 pit-per-year capacity in 2023.” They argue that the plan to “modernize” its weapons production “is, to say the least, questionable. The agency proposes to first build 800 pits for new US intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warheads, which would be needed only if the US decides to increase the number of warheads on each missile from one to three.”
–Kennedy Maize
To subscribe to The Quad Report, use the email and type “subscribe” in the subject line.
To comment: