Archive for the ‘News’ Category

June 26, 2014

By Staci Matlock
The New Mexican

ALBUQUERQUE — State environment officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow the U.S. Department of Energy to store highly radioactive waste in new containers without a public hearing.

State officials told a panel of the New Mexico Court of Appeals during a hearing in Albuquerque that the new “shielded” containers are a safer, more efficient way to handle the waste.

The hearing was held to air ongoing arguments in a 2-year-old case brought by the Southwest Research and Information Center, a nuclear safety watchdog organization.

The case received relatively little notice when it was filed, but it has taken on new significance since a container at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad leaked radiation in February and forced regulators to shut down the underground storage facility. Investigators are still trying to determine the exact cause of the leak, but they are focusing on a volatile chemical mixture in a container shipped from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The case also has put state regulators in a tricky spot as they continue to scrutinize the Department of Energy’s oversight of WIPP while at the same time defending a decision to allow the use of new containers for highly radioactive waste without a public hearing.

On Thursday, the judges asked if it would be prudent to wait until the investigation into the WIPP leak is complete before they rule on the case about the container switch.

Jeffrey Kendall, New Mexico Environment Department general counsel, told the judges the leaking container at WIPP had nothing to do with new shielded containers for hot waste and shouldn’t hold up a ruling.

Lindsay Lovejoy, attorney for the Southwest Research and Information Center, said it might be prudent to wait because changes made at WIPP due to the February leak could affect all containers for any waste shipped to the facility in the future, including the hot waste.

The Court of Appeals panel has been mulling this case since closing arguments were made in July 2013, but it still hadn’t made a decision when the Feb. 14 leak at WIPP occurred.

The state Environment Department oversees the Department of Energy’s operating permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and the latter must ask for the state’s blessing on any changes in handling the waste. In late 2012, the Department of Energy asked to change the type of containers used for highly radioactive waste. The state department gave the public 60 days to file written comments but didn’t set a public hearing. In 2013, the state granted the federal agency’s request.

The Southwest Research and Information Center appealed the decision, saying the Environment Department should have held a public hearing because the new containers were less robust than the ones used at the time for the hot waste. Moreover, the center said the department violated its own procedures by changing its mind about the public hearing without giving a reason.

By the time the appeal was filed, nine of the new shielded containers carrying waste from Argonne Laboratory had already been shipped to WIPP and stored underground. They are stored in a different room than the one where the leak occurred in February.

Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director for the Southwest Research and Information Center, said a public hearing would have allowed the public to question state and federal regulators about the containers and provide testimony that could serve as evidence in court. A written comment period doesn’t have nearly the same flexibility or degree of scrutiny, he said.

Hancock said regulations require a public hearing when the federal agency requests a change to the WIPP permit that has significant public interest and is technically complex.

He said the public weighed in heavily during a hearing on the initial decision several years ago to allow storage of more highly radioactive waste at WIPP, including the type of container it could be stored in. “Those were very robust cylinders. The DOE is still using them,” he said.

“There was then, and there still is, significant public interest about hotter waste,” Hancock said. The public should have been offered a chance in a public hearing to more closely question regulators about the change in containers, he argues.

With regard to a public hearing, the Environment Department said in an email after Thursday’s court hearing, “A letter was sent out in error in December 2012” indicating the permit change for the containers would include a public hearing. “The letter was rescinded four business days later on Dec. 28, 2011.”

The department did not say why the change was made.

Kendall told the three judges that shielded containers are a newer technology that allow the “waste to be received and disposed of more efficiently and in a safer manner.”

He said two other permit changes requested by the Department of Energy regarding Trupact containers used to ship mixed, low-level radioactive waste also were subject to 60-day comment periods and no public hearing. “We are trying to be consistent,” he said.

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.

Hancock said he and others still have many questions about the testing and safety of the shielded containers that have yet to be answered by regulators.

In light of regulatory problems leading up to the February leak at WIPP, Hancock said he hoped the Environment Department would take a second look at the shielded containers.

The judges did not rule on Thursday and have several options. They could simply agree with the Environment Department that no public hearing was needed or side with the Southwest Research and Information Center. They could send the whole case back to the Environment Department and tell them to reconsider the decision, or they could simply wait until investigations into the WIPP leak are finished and a final report on that incident is issued.

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.

The Department of Energy and nuclear waste-generating sites need some clarity, state Environment Department officials said, noting that “the uncertainty has somewhat of a chilling effect on their ability to implement these advanced technologies.”

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

State legislators look for answers about leak in underground facility

July 23, 2014

By Julie Ann Grimm
Santa Fe Reporter

What do the OJ Simpson murder trial and a nuclear waste leak in southern New Mexico have in common?

A single glove.

Legislators at a Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee meeting in Los Alamos chuckled when Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, made the comparison. Yet, it was still an accurate summary of a report the lawmakers heard Wednesday about a serious problem for the long-term storage of dangerous contaminants.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are still trying to determine exactly what caused a barrel buried at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project to burst open in February, said LANL chemist Nan Sauer, but they now have a pretty good idea of the materials that were involved.

Sauer, leader of the lab’s internal technical investigations, has been working on the problem since officials first learned of the contamination alarm at the Carlsbad facility on Valentine’s Day.

She told committee members that tests have revealed that the barrel in question contained a rare combination of waste products from the lab: wheat-based kitty litter that was used to absorb plutonium contaminated nitrate salts; material with high acidity; and trace metals such as lead, tungsten and chromium that are components of a glove.

The waste inside the burst barrel and been stored without incident at at lab for about 30 years, Sauer explained. That changed, she said, after the 2012 repackaging of that "parent" barrel into two "daughter" barrels. One became the problem child, No. 68660.

Workers at the lab use containment devices called glove boxes that allow for handling and repacking of waste generated in the research and development of the nations’s nuclear stockpile. The gloves that form a barrier for workers are routinely changed and placed into barrels along with waste, as was recorded for No. 68660. But investigators now believe the metals in the glove might have reacted with nitrate salts after temperatures rose in the barrel at WIPP.

"Glove box gloves and nitric acid and lead have been implicated in other energetic events within the DOE complex," Sauer said.

Just how the temps increased to initiate the reaction, however, is still up for debate. Theories about what initiated the reaction include warmth generated by decomposition of the litter (a commercially available substance called Swheat that Sauer says won’t be used anymore ). Another hypothesis would put the blame on heat from a truck fire that occurred inside WIPP a half mile from the barrel location about nine days before an air monitor detected the radiation leak. Smoke from the fire might have also affected ventilation systems and led to hotter air, she said.

Sauer noted that the lab is busily performing more tests to try to answer the temperature question to assist with the Department of Energy’s accident investigation board.

"We have done a lot of work and narrowed down the parameters to a very specific set of reactions that could have occurred in the drum, and our chemists are continuing to work on answering those questions," she said. "We really feel that we are coming very, very close to the answer in terms of what the chemical reactions were."

Meanwhile, work on characterization and packaging as well as transportation to the WIPP facility has been suspended. About 700 barrels that contain the nitrates and kitty litter are now stored with extra precaution at the lab and at a Texas holding facility where they were already awaiting transportation to Carlsbad at the time of the detected problem, said Peter Maggiore, the National Nuclear Safety Administration’s assistant manager for environmental programs at the lab.

Legislators who asked when those operations would resume got a straight answer from Maggiore: No one knows.

"We have not established a date whereby we will resume operations," he said, indicating that until federal investigations wrap up and officials agree on the next steps, the waste will stay put. "Any date that I might give you just wouldn’t be a valuable date"

The barrels are part of more than 3,700 cubic meters of waste planned for removal from the lab’s Area G and relocated in the the underground salt caves of WIPP by next year. It’s clear now that goal won’t be met.

Chemists, engineers with expertise in heat transfer and others are part of two technical teams on the the case, Sauer said, noting that investigators are using a broad approach to ensure the best understanding of the nature of the event.

Later in the day, state Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn told legislators that he believes the federal and state agencies will work for another six months to a year before there’s a resolution. The bottom line, he says, is that LANL or its contractors erred in sending reactive materials to WIPP in violation of permits and rules. Communication breakdowns are also in play, he said.

Maggiore noted that even though some parts of the waste characterization and removal process are halted, the lab continues other cleanup efforts required by an agreement with federal and state regulators including monsoon runoff monitoring upstream from the Santa Fe city and county Buckman water diversion from the Rio Grande.

"We realize that there has been some trust lost in this whole process," Maggiore said. "We do have a lot of work ahead of us to regain that trust."

"Their jobs won’t ever be the same… will face new paradigm" — Concerns plutonium contaminated surrounding salt — Preparing for radiation levels so high, only robots can be used (VIDEO)

April 22nd, 2014

By ENENews

Albuquerque Journal News, Apr. 22, 2014: WIPP workers face big changes, Their jobs won’t ever be the same — Now that contamination has been discovered underground – although the extent is still unknown – the contractor that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant says workers will face a new paradigm when they return to the site: more formality, tougher rules and more protective gear. […] those working underground will likely be doing their jobs in a more hazardous environment – or one where the risks have been made more evident – with new rules of engagement to protect them from exposure to radiation. […] plutonium and americium may have contaminated rock salt walls, mixed into dust on the floor, and clung to machinery and other equipment underground. If stirred or scuffed up, the radiation can become airborne and inhaled. […] NWP workers are not permitted to speak to the press, according to a spokesman.

• Bob McQuinn, new president/project manager of WIPP operator: "The place […] now has, not more than the rest of the sites, but similar radiation protection hazards […] Now we’re going to have to wear protective equipment – coveralls, shoe covers and gloves – to make sure contamination doesn’t get on us and respirators so it doesn’t get in us. People who haven’t had to wear protective equipment will have to."
• Dr. Fred Mettler, radiologist and US representative to the United Nations World Health and Atomic Energy Agency: "The first rule of thumb is nobody thinks any of this is good for you. So you want to keep doses as low as possible. Medically, it’s very, very difficult to get the stuff out of you."
• Jim Frederick, United Steel Workers assistant director of health, safety and environment: "Is this place going to be safe for our folks to go back to? […] What was not in place that might have kept this from happening? And what do we need to do to keep the workers safe and make sure the public health risks are kept at zero or very, very close to zero?"

KOAT, Apr. 20, 2014: "The more they went into panel 7, the more it started becoming more widespread," said WIPP deputy recovery manager Tammy Reynolds. […] Inspectors plan to go back down and explore things further, but in case the radiation levels pose too much of a threat, robots will go underground instead. "Robot operators have already been to the WIPP site, received all of the training to go to the underground," said Reynolds.

Carlsbad Current-Argus, Apr. 22, 2014: robots are on standby to support the recovery operations

Watch KOAT’s broadcast here:

Gov’t: "We’ve never seen a level like we are seeing… I can’t tell you the amount" — Could be Plutonium — ‘Unclear’ how much radiation released — Unprecedented event (VIDEO)

February 16th, 2014

By ENENews – Energy News

Reuters, Feb. 16, 2014 (emphasis added): Unusually high levels of radioactive particles were found at an underground nuclear waste site in New Mexico on Saturday in what a spokesman said looked like the first real alarm since the plant opened in 1999. […] radioactive waste, such as plutonium used in defense research and nuclear weapon making, is dumped half a mile below ground […] "But I believe it’s safe to say we’ve never seen a level like we are seeing. We just don’t know if it’s a real event, but it looks like one," [Energy spokesman Roger Nelson] said. It was not yet clear what caused the air-monitoring system to indicate that radioactive particles were present at unsafe levels, Nelson said. […]

AP, Feb. 16, 2014: WIPP […] takes plutonium-contaminated waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory and other federal nuclear projects. [….] Nelson says the cause of the leak is not known […] He couldn’t quantify the level it takes to trigger the monitors […] We are going to take measurements and make sure we understand it" before sending in a team, he said.

Carlsbad Current Argus, Feb. 16, 2014: "These are radionuclides that are of a hazard if inhaled […] the primary concern for the release of this nature is (through) the ventilation passageway […] I can’t tell you the amount or level but they were elevated and above normal, above background," Nelson said of the radiation that was detected airborne near Panel 7, Room 7, in the south salt mine. According to Nelson this is the first time in WIPP’s 15-year history that the facility has had a CAM alarm detect this level of radiation underground […] WIPP entered emergency status less than two weeks ago, when an underground fire was reported […] underground operations have been suspended since the incident […]

UPI, Feb. 16, 2014: […] it was unclear exactly how much radiation has been released from the WIPP. "Additional sampling is going on. We have employees sequestered in place so that we minimize any potential for airborne inhalation," [said Nelson.]

Watch the KREQ broadcast here:

City of 2.5 million nearly 200 miles away "within transnational evacuation zone in event of a nuclear disaster" — Local officials meeting with U.S. gov’t — Whistleblower: If plutonium released "surrounding population should take precautions"

March 26th, 2014

By ENENews – Energy News

U.S. Radiation Leak Concerns Mexicans, by Kent Paterson, Editor of Frontera NorteSur and Curriculum Developer with the project of the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University (NMSU), Mar. 24, 2014: Serious problems at a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico have caught the eyes of the press and government officials in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico [Population: 2.5 million]. […] Since February 14, additional radiation releases [from WIPP] connected to the original one have been reported, even as more workers are still awaiting test results for possible radiation exposure during the first event. Although Ciudad Juarez is located nearly 200 miles from WIPP, city officials expect to meet with U.S. government representatives on March 26 or 27 to discuss ongoing issues from the February 14 incident. A story in El Diario newspaper said that Ciudad Juarez (and neighboring El Paso and Las Cruces) were well within a transnational evacuation zone in the event of a nuclear disaster. While WIPP spokespersons say that the radiation releases have been minimal and pose no danger to public health, Mexican officials are anxious to hear the message in person. […] Despite U.S. and Mexican government reports of little or no radioactive contamination from the WIPP leak, public doubts about the gravity of the February 14 incident persist due to incomplete contaminant data reporting, the slowness in getting all the potentially exposed workers tested and informed, spotty or contradictory statements by regulatory officials, and uncertainties over the origin of the radiation leak and how far an area it has impacted. […] Back in the 1990s, Ciudad Juarez and U.S. environmentalists from the Rio Bravo Ecological Alliance took a stand against WIPP based partly on concerns that the underground storage facility would eventually contaminate the Pecos River Basin and the Rio Grande.

Alejandro Gloria, chief of Ciudad Juarez’s municipal ecology department: "Everything is fine. There are no plutonium or strange particulates that have been detected inside the filters." […] the WIPP crisis could lead to a review of nuclear safeguards in the greater border region [ant they are] looking at geologic stability and the possible effects of the WIPP site on groundwater as issues that could be reexamined by the Mexican Congress and Chihuahua State Legislature.

Fernando Motta Allen, director of Ciudad Juarez’s civil protection department (emphasis added): "Next week, people from the EPA and the U.S. DOE are going to come with first-hand information to guarantee that no risks exist." […] Ciudad Juarez has two radiation detection devices, but […] the city had no specialists to operate them […] the equipment is easy to use and comes with a complete instruction manual.

Mexican whistle-blower Bernardo Salas Mar, a former employee of the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant in Veracruz: Important bits of information need to be confirmed about the WIPP radiation release like the wind patterns at the time of the incident and the possible geographic scope of the spread of contaminants. "The answer to these questions will lend knowledge to the damage that could have been caused […] After (radiation) ingestion or incorporation into the human organism, 10 or 15 years or more pass before the appearance of some kind of cancer. [If plutonium and americium were indeed released into the larger environment] the surrounding population should take precautions in order to avoid exposure to these contaminants."

Dr. Mariana Chew, environmental engineer: A cross-border, information-credibility gap existed with regards to WIPP. "The same thing always happens. It happened with Asarco (ex-El Paso smelter) and other environmental disasters that weren’t made known to the public […] Given the history, this radiation shouldn’t be taken lightly. Whenever something happens, that’s when you hear about it."

See also: Official: Radioactive material escaping everyday from WIPP and dispersing — Top officials "not made available for comment" — Expert: Leaks from ‘unfiltered’ ducts went on for weeks