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July 3, 2014

By Staci Matlock
Santa Fe The New Mexican

Los Alamos National Laboratory has admitted mistakes were made in processing waste containers, including one that ruptured in the nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad, causing a radiation leak that shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

LANL filed a report Thursday with the state Environment Department that cited noncompliance issues — but stopped short of saying the errors caused the leak.

The lab’s manager, Los Alamos National Security LLC, and the Department of Energy investigated the waste processing after a container from LANL burst open Feb. 14 in Panel 7 of the deep salt caverns at WIPP. The lab said it had “"insufficient evidence" that mistakes in handling nitrate salt-bearing waste had caused the container to leak.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, however, said the lab and Department of Energy’s assertion that there was insufficient evidence to link mistakes to the leak was "false."

"They very much do relate to the radioactive release at WIPP," Mello said of the errors listed in the report. "They did pose a threat to human health and the environment, and they still do."

State Environment Department officials said in a statement that they are reviewing these initial violations and plan “to take appropriate actions" following an independent review of the incidents at WIPP and LANL.

Lab officials said in a statement, "As part of our ongoing internal investigation, we have identified shortcomings in the processing procedures that led to actions not covered by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Hazardous Waste Facility Permit. The focus is now on correcting these processes, in addition to ongoing recovery work."

Federal and state investigators narrowed down the leak at WIPP to several drums from LANL. Chemists have said a combination of nitrate salts in the waste, a pH neutralizer and a wheat-based kitty litter used as an absorbent material in the drum could have caused a chemical reaction that cracked open the lid of the container.

Investigators still haven’t confirmed that a bad chemical mix is what caused the leak.

The eight-page report filed by the lab and federal officials details how the waste was handled and repackaged at the lab. The report concludes that adding the pH neutralizer and the organic kitty litter violated the lab’s hazardous waste permit from the state.

The lab approved the use of the neutralizers and a switch from inorganic clay absorbents to the wheat-based kitty litter in 2013, according to documents.

The lab and the Energy Department also found the waste stream should have been re-evaluated when technicians realized there was corrosive liquid in the drums that could react with other chemicals.

The lab has stopped processing the nitrate salt-bearing drums while officials continue to investigate. A total of 86 of the drums are stored in domes at the lab’s Area G waste facility. Of those, 57 have been treated with the neutralizer and the organic kitty litter, giving them the same potential for a chemical reaction. The other 29 containers haven’t been processed yet. The lab has created a remediation team to decide how to proceed with handling the waste.

Lab officials told the state Environment Department on June 3 that they were investigating possible irregularities in how radioactive waste containers with nitrate salts were processed at the lab’s facility.

The company contracted to repackage the waste, Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions, has had three rounds of layoffs, totaling 83 people, since March 30. Company officials said the first round was due to completion of the waste repackaging project, and the firm was cutting back on personnel at the lab. The company said subsequent layoffs, the latest of which occurred Monday, were because Los Alamos National Security had to shift $20 million of the contract funds to cover costs of storing containers at a Texas facility and to help with the leak investigation at WIPP.

On the Web

• Read the LANL report at www.nmenv.state.nm.us/NMED/Issues/documents/LANLNoncomplianceNotice7-01-14.pdf

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @stacimatlock.

July 2, 2014

By Staci Matlock
Santa Fe The New Mexican

The Feb. 14 radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad has sparked layoffs by a Los Alamos National Laboratory contractor.
EnergySolutions, the private company hired to pack mixed radioactive waste for shipment from Los Alamos to Carlsbad, laid off 40 employees Monday, for a total of 83 layoffs since the end of March.

Of the 40 employees laid off Monday, 28 were local people and four had relocated to Northern New Mexico for the lab waste project. EnergySolutions spokesman Mark Walker wasn’t sure how many of the other people laid off earlier were local.

Lab officials said the layoff coincided with the June 30 expiration of the lab’s subcontract with EnergySolutions.

But a company spokesman said some of the layoffs were made because LANL needed to shift funding to pay for storage of waste containers at a Texas facility after the radiation leak closed WIPP and to pay for part of the ongoing investigation into the leak.

EnergySolutions, based in Salt Lake City, was hired to repackage and ship out 3,706 cubic meters of transuranic waste by June 30. Transuranic waste consists of contaminated laboratory equipment and clothing, along with some liquids, used during nuclear research over the last several decades.

All of the transuranic waste had been packaged and ready to ship by the end of March, according to Walker. A total of 34 EnergySolutions employees were laid off then to “meet LANL requirements,” according to a letter from company Vice President Miles Smith.

Then in February, a LANL waste container that had been packed by EnergySolutions cracked open at WIPP, releasing radiation into the underground facility. All transuranic waste shipments from the lab were halted.

EnergySolutions laid off 23 more employees June 2 and were scheduled to lay off 58 on June 30.

“This is being driven by the fact that $20M of LANL’s 2014 Environmental Management funding has been reallocated to pay for the WIPP incident Technical Assistance Team made up of national laboratory personnel from across DOE and for continued storage of 113 containers of waste at Waste Control Specialists [in Andrews, Texas],” Smith said in a letter to the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities.

Of the 58 employees scheduled for layoffs Monday, 14 were reassigned to jobs elsewhere in the company. EnergySolutions kept 18 on for other contracted waste projects at LANL. EnergySolutions will work as a subcontractor for Albuquerque-based Environmental Dimensions Inc., which has a five-year federal contract that began July 1 for radioactive waste retrieval and packaging at the lab, according to Walker.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, a watchdog group, said LANL and the Department of Energy had other funds it could have tapped instead of using contract money for EnergySolutions. “It looks like Energy Solutions is being made to pay heavily for a mistake that was — at the very least — not entirely its own. Los Alamos National Security is the one ultimately to blame here.”

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock(at)sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @stacimatlock.

07/03/2014

Associated Press

LOS ALAMOS – The Los Alamos contractor that packaged the radioactive waste linked to a leak at the government’s nuclear waste dump is laying off workers.

A Los Alamos spokesman Wednesday confirmed that Energy Solutions has reduced its workforce by 115 because its contract for packing the waste for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad expired June 30. That is the date the lab was supposed to have thousands of barrels of contaminated waste off its northern New Mexico campus. But the final shipments were halted after the February leak that shuttered WIPP was traced to a barrel packed by Energy Solutions.

Scientists think a reaction in the waste was fueled by the inorganic cat litter that was packed in the barrel to absorb moisture. Investigators are looking at the process followed by Los Alamos and the contractor in switching from inorganic to organic litter.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press.

Jul 8, 2014

By Tim Jones
Bloomberg News

The Kewaunee Power Station, Wisconsin
Photographer: AP Photo

The best jobs and the biggest employer are disappearing from the town of Carlton, Wisconsin, leaving behind a site that should be ready for a new employer to move in, perhaps a half-century from now.

That’s the legacy of the 2013 shutdown of the Kewaunee Power Station, which generated nuclear energy for 39 years along the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The plant is being dismantled, or decommissioned, a potentially decades-long clean-up that could remove as much as 900 acres from the economic development base of rural Kewaunee County.

"Probably 60 years for sure," said David Hardtke, the chairman of the town of about 1,000. "All I know is I won’t be around. I guess my kids will have to fight that one out."

The Wisconsin facility is part of what Moody’s Investors Service describes as the largest wave of U.S.-based nuclear and coal electric-plant retirements in the past 35 years. The closings stem from abundant supplies of cheaper natural gas and changes in environmental policies. The consequences can be sudden and drastic, affecting school funding, real-estate values and economic development that were linked to the facilities.

Unlike abandoned industrial plants, which can be retooled for another manufacturer, nuclear plants leave another legacy: radioactive waste, which at the Kewaunee site sits in concrete canisters about 100 yards (91 meters) from Lake Michigan.

"The challenge that local officials have to face is large," said Julie Beglin, one of the report’s co-authors.

Economic Power

Sixty-four nuclear plant sites are spread across the country, with 100 operating reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. About half those reactors are comparable in age to the Kewaunee facility, having been built between 1968 and 1979. The plentiful supply of less-expensive energy, such as natural gas, increases the risk to local governments that are financially reliant on the plants, Moody’s said.

"These places are located in largely rural communities and so they are often the biggest taxpayer in the locality," said Daniel Lipman, executive director of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington-based nonprofit advocate for the nuclear power industry.

Hot Gas

Dominion Resources Inc. (D), a Richmond, Virginia-based power company, closed the 556-megawatt Wisconsin plant in May 2013, citing economics that worked against it.

"It was cheaper to purchase energy on the open market than to produce it at Kewaunee," said Mark Kanz, a company spokesman. "I’m sure it won’t be the last to close. There will be other plants that go through decommissioning, whether it’s economics or from equipment-related issues."

Moody’s said natural-gas supplies are influencing decisions to "retrofit or extend the life" of plants. While the economics of power generation can change, two factors work against the nuclear industry, said David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"The cost of non-nuclear electricity is trending down," Lochbaum said, "and the cost of maintaining aging nuclear power reactors is trending up."

The Vermont Yankee nuclear power station, in the southeast Vermont community of Vernon, is to close by year-end. Moody’s said the town of 2,200 receives 48 percent its operating revenue from operation of the plant, which is owned by Entergy Corp. (ENT)

Six Decades

The aftermath of a nuclear power plant’s leaving a community is more complicated and lengthy than the end of a conventional industrial facility. Federal regulations governing the decommissioning of sites are designed to protect the public.

The process must be completed within 60 years, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Seventeen plants, including Kewaunee, are in some phase of decommissioning, the NRC said on its website.

The Wisconsin facility was the largest employer in Kewaunee County, a rural expanse east of Green Bay, where dairy cows outnumber the 21,000 people by a ratio of more than 2-to-1. About 630 people worked at the plant before it closed last year. Now, about 260 work on mothballing it. By October, only 140 will.

"They were the highest-paying jobs in the county, and a big chunk of that was flowing through the economy," said Ron Heuer, chairman of the county board of commissioners. "What the hell do we do now?"

Linda Sinkula, Carlton’s clerk and also a county supervisor, said the town will have little choice but to raise taxes.

"It’s just a mess," she said.

Empty Booths

Carlton will lose about $360,000 in annual revenue, roughly 70 percent of its $515,000 budget, said Hardtke, the town chairman. The county will lose about $730,000 a year, Heuer said.

At the street level, Kunkel’s Korner, a diner in downtown Kewaunee, about 5 miles north of the plant, is less busy.

"People we used to see three times a week we now see only once a week," said owner Mark Kunkel. "We’d average 100 to 125 a day. Now it’s down to 80 to 85."

There’s a glut of homes for sale, with a 25 percent to 30 percent increase in houses on the market, said real-estate agent Jack Novak.

Yet to be determined is the taxable value of the Kewaunee plant site and how much revenue Carlton and the county could anticipate. Hardtke said an appraiser is evaluating the land and that his report should be submitted in weeks.

Fallow Ground

The experience of Zion, Illinois, a Lake Michigan community of 24,000 about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, suggests the value will be a fraction of the taxes generated when that town’s nuclear power plant was operating.

The Zion nuclear power station, built in 1973, closed in 1998 after an equipment failure led to a yearlong shutdown. At its peak in 1996, the plant on about 200 acres paid the town $19.6 million, according to Finance Director David Knabel. That was roughly half the tax base, he said.

More than 16 years later, the plant is still being dismantled. The cooling towers remain, and nuclear waste is stored in a bunker. Taxes collected on the site amounted to only $1.5 million in 2012, Knabel said.

"There’s 200 acres of lakefront property that is completely undevelopable, unusable until they are done decommissioning the site," Knabel said.

"I’d love to be able to put condos and restaurants there, but they’d be overlooking a bunker filled with nuclear waste," Knabel said.

In the meantime, Scott Bortolini, who chairs the Kewaunee County Economic Development Corp., said the search is on for new jobs. Dairy cows represent 25 percent of the county’s economy, "but they don’t pay a lot of taxes," he said.

(A previous version of this story spelled Daniel Lipman’s name incorrectly.)

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman(at)bloomberg.net

Something Happened in February, Something is STILL Going On

July 6th, 2014

by William Boardman
Dissident Voice

Environmental radiation releases spiked again in mid-June around the surface site of the only U.S. underground nuclear weapons waste storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), has been shut down since February 14, when its isolation technology failed, releasing unsafe levels of Plutonium, Americium, and other radio-nuclides into the environment around the site.

Radiation levels in the underground storage area, 2,150 feet below the surface vary from near-normal to potentially lethal. At the time of the February accident, more than 20 WIPP workers suffered low level radioactive contamination, even though none of them were underground. WIPP assumes, but cannot confirm, that underground conditions have not changed since May 31, when the last entry team went into the mine, as reported by WIPP field manager Jose Franco on June 5:

As I noted in my previous letter, we have identified the damaged drum believed to be a contributing source of the radiological release. On May 31, an entry team was able to safely and successfully collect six samples from a variety of locations in Panel 7 of Room 7, including from the breached drum and a nearby standard waste box. These sample results are consistent with the contamination previously identified.

In mid-March, WIPP suffered a surface radiation release almost twice the levels released in February. WIPP was designed to isolate highly radioactive nuclear weapons waste from the environment for 10,000 years. It went 15 years before its first leak of radioactivity into the above ground environment.

The latest elevated radiation levels were detected by monitors placed by the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED). The monitors measure radiation only after it has passed through the WIPP filtration system that is designed to minimize radiation from escaping from the storage area half a mile underground. Radiation levels in the storage area where the original leak occurred are possibly as lethal as Fukushima, hampering efforts to determine the source, cause, and scale of the February leak.

What happened underground remains a mystery and a danger

More than five months after the February accident, officials still have no certain understanding of what went wrong. It is generally thought that one 55 gallon drum of waste (perhaps more than one) overheated and burst, spilling radioactive waste in a part of the storage area known as Panel 7, Room 7. This room, designated a "High Contamination Area," measures 33 by 80 feet and presently has 24 rows of waste containers. The room holds 258 containers, tightly stacked and packed wall-to-wall, with no aisles to allow easy access. There is some clearance between the top of the stacks and the room’s ceiling.

The high contamination in Room 7 is a threat to human inspectors, limiting inspection of the room to date to mechanical means, primarily cameras on extension arms. As a result of these limitations, WIPP teams have inspected only ten of the 24 rows of waste containers in Room 7. Rows #1-14 have been out of reach of the available equipment.

WIPP has begun building a full scale replica of Room 7 above ground, to provide a realistic staging area in which to test methods of remote observation that might reach the 14 uninspected rows. According to WIPP:

Options include a device that uses carbon fiber rods to extend the camera, a gantry camera suspended on wires, or a boom system mounted on a trolley that would move across the waste face from wall to wall and out 90 feet to view all rows of waste.

WIPP has spent much of June improving the air filtration system to the mine, adding filters that reduce escaping radiation and improving underground air flow for the sake of entry teams. WIPP suspended underground entries on May 31, apparently to improve safety conditions. Reporting on June 18, field manager Jose Franco wrote:

Since the radiological event, we have safely entered the underground facility nearly a dozen times. Each time, we learn more and we use those discoveries to refine our tasks moving forward. Our entry teams have identified a breached container and we are using all of the resources at our disposal to find the cause.

No one is more eager than we are to determine what happened and return to normal operations.

Nuclear waste in Los Alamos puts National Lab at risk

"Normal operations" in the past included accepting thousands of waste-filled containers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is under a June 30 legal deadline to clean up its above ground and shallow underground waste that has accumulated since the 1940s when Los Alamos scientists were building the first atomic bombs.

The contractor packaging LANL waste into containers made a change a while back, substituting organic kitty litter for the standard inorganic product. More than 500 containers with organic kitty litter have been prepared, 368 of them already stored underground at WIPP. One frequently cited theory (promoted by a WIPP booster) is that one or more of these containers underwent a chemical, heat-generating process because of the organic kitty litter and that reaction caused the container to burst.

The rest of these containers with organic matter are temporarily buried at a West Texas site or remain on the LANL property. They are under constant watch and reportedly none have failed to date.

Los Alamos has been under pressure to clean up its radioactive waste for years, if not decades. But it took the approach of wildfires to the LANL waste site for the laboratory to enter into a binding agreement with the state Environment Department to remove all the waste it has accumulated. As the June 30 deadline approached, LANL again asked the state for an extension of the deadline, saying there wasn’t enough money in its federal budget to comply with the court order.

In the past, the state had granted an extension more than 100 times. This time New Mexico said no. That will subject LANL to further sanctions, including fines.

Lawsuit over state-approved high-level waste containers

Almost two years ago, after the state approved new containers for use at WIPP without holding a public hearing on the application, the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) sued to block the containers from coming into use. In the Center’s view, these new, shielded containers were less robust than containers already in use for highly radioactive waste. That issue should have been considered at a public hearing, SRIC argued at the time:

The Appellants and approximately 200 individuals requested that the request to modify the state’s WIPP permit be subject to a public hearing because of the dangers posed by RH [Remote Handled] waste, the technical complexity of handling RH waste at WIPP, and the substantial public interest in the request. NMED ignored those comments and approved the Department of Energy (DOE) request despite the fact that the state agency had in December 2011 and January 2012 rejected virtually the same request.

Remote Handled (RH) waste is so designated because radiation levels are too high to allow close personal contact, so the waste must be handled by remote-controlled machinery. About 10 per cent of WIPP waste is Remote Handled.

In December 2012, NMED had publicly announced a public hearing on the new container issue. The department rescinded the hearing notice four days later, without explaining the change.

The New Mexico Appeals Court heard closing arguments in the case in July 2013, but had not rendered a decision at the time of the February 2014 accident at WIPP.

On June 26, the court held a further hearing to consider whether the radiation release at WIPP was relevant to the use of the new, high-level waste containers. As reported by the New Mexican, this case has a number of anomalies:

The Environment Department said in an email that the shielded containers can be transported in fewer shipments, and the process is quicker and significantly reduces the dosage rates of radiation from the drums.

Moreover, although the department doesn’t know who manufactures the shielded containers, their safety has been vetted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency….

Regulators and the nuclear watchdog group hope the judges will make a decision sooner rather than later. Even though WIPP is closed for now, a whole lot of highly radioactive waste has to be packaged into containers for temporary storage until shipments resume.

Investigations rampant, answers scarce

On June 16, four months after the radiation release from WIPP, the Department of Energy (DOE), announced its "decision to conduct an investigation into the facts and circumstances associated with potential programmatic deficiencies in the nuclear safety, radiation protection, emergency management, quality assurance, and worker safety and health programs revealed by the February 2014 fire and radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project."

Currently there are at least nine investigations into WIPP’s failure, including DOE, which operates the facility largely through private contractors. A few days later, a DOE attorney told the New Mexico Court of Appeals that "Nobody is contemplating a closure of WIPP", but that WIPP is unlikely to reopen until 2016 at the earliest.

In March, Don Hancok of SRIC published a piece listing questions that were then unanswered:

• What caused the leak?

• How much leaked into the underground salt mine?

• How much leaked into the environment?

• Where are those radioactive and toxic wastes now?

• To what amount of radiation were the workers exposed?

• What are the health effects for those workers?

• What decontamination is necessary in the underground mine?

• What decontamination is necessary on the WIPP site and surrounding area?

• If WIPP reopens, what changes in the operation, monitoring, and safety culture will be implemented?

On June 25, Hancock published another piece in the same online magazine, La Jicarita, pointing out that the questions of March all remained unanswered in June.

The piece carried this headline:

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first published in Reader Supported News. Read other articles by William.