ECA Update: November 24, 2014
Published: Mon, 11/24/14
$359 Million for PGDP Cleanup
WKMS
November 21, 2014
The Paducah Area Community Reuse Organization expects the U.S. Department of Energy to spend about $359 million on the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant cleanup for 2015.
PACRO Director Charlie Martin says $89 million left over from last year will roll over to join the 2015 allocation of $270 million dollars. He says this is higher than what DOE generally allocates annually to the PGDP cleanup, which is good for PACRO.
"The more money we have, the more cleanup we accomplish, the more opportunities there are for PACRO to benefit from asset transfer or from reuse of facilities."
Martin says he is concerned, though, by left over money not spent within the fiscal year.
"If we don't expend the money that congress appropriates for us in a given year that it will have a detrimental effect in trying to get funding for the subsequent years."
Martin says the uranium market is up. He hopes that bodes well for Global Laser Enrichment continued negotiations with the DOE for the purchase of depleted uranium tails and use of the site.
PACRO is tasked with mitigating the closure of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, pushing for federal clean-up dollars, and promoting the former uranium enrichment site for future development.
Hanford whistleblower probe stalled early on -- memo
E&E Publishing
November 20, 2014
A Department of Energy investigation into the contentious firing of a Hanford nuclear waste site official met initial resistance from some of the government's biggest contractors.
Little more than a month into the probe, DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman alerted Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to problems he was running into with URS Corp. and Bechtel Corp. -- two contracting giants that are working at the site. Friedman said in an April 9 memorandum obtained by Greenwire under the Freedom of Information Act that the two companies were not consenting to interviews regarding his investigation of whistleblower Donna Busche's termination.
"Unfortunately, the firms representing URS and BNI [Bechtel] have been slow in cooperating with our requests to schedule interviews with specific employees," Friedman wrote. "Of the 23 interviews we have requested, we have only been able to interview 3 employees."
The watchdog was frustrated by the contractors' lack of cooperation -- a sentiment he wanted to convey to the secretary who requested the Busche investigation in March.
"In the interest of bringing this important matter to a timely conclusion, we find the responses from both URS and BNI and their attorneys to be unacceptable," Friedman wrote.
The IG would win this battle with URS and Bechtel. The two companies eventually granted the interviews requested of them for the investigation.
"We ultimately interviewed URS and BNI officials with the cooperation of the department," said Tara Porter, a spokeswoman for the DOE IG.
Nevertheless, Friedman's memo foreshadowed further friction between the IG and the contractors. Last month, the inspector general would throw his hands up and declare that he couldn't make a judgment on Busche's firing after not receiving requested documents from URS and Bechtel (Greenwire, Oct. 20).
Watchdog groups have been frustrated by DOE's response to the firing of an official who raised safety concerns at the nation's largest nuclear waste site.
"When push comes to shove, they're not going to hold these contractors accountable," said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, a public interest organization that monitors the site. "People at Hanford roll their eyes and say if you're a whistleblower, you can't win."
Busche "is a talented safety professional who had her brilliant career terminated," added Carpenter.
Initial problems in the IG investigation of Busche's firing were reported by Weapons Complex Monitor earlier this year. The public release of Friedman's memo, however, shows the extent of the obstacles that were in front of the IG and that Moniz himself had knowledge early on of the probe's rough start.
A DOE spokeswoman noted the secretary requested the investigation and said "fostering a questioning, safety-driven attitude among our federal and contractor employees is key to achieving our mission and safely delivering this important project."
"The department acted promptly to produce all requested information in its possession and regrets that the IG could not complete its review and provide an opinion," said the DOE spokeswoman.
The contractors in question said they granted the interviews requested of them after Friedman wrote his memo.
"We granted all interviews requested by the U.S. Department of Energy inspector general," said a URS spokeswoman, adding the company believes that Busche's claim "is without merit" and that URS has "a strong safety record and our corporate culture makes safety our highest priority."
Fred deSousa, a spokesman for Bechtel, referred Greenwire to the company's statement released last month in response to the IG's move to not issue a decision on Busche's firing.
That statement said the company "went above and beyond in cooperating with the Inspector General's investigation," providing documents and interviews to the watchdog. It also noted that Busche was a URS employee and the decision to fire her was made by that company alone.
But a month after the IG decided against weighing in, representatives for Busche are angered by the lack of consequences for Hanford contractors.
"It seems to me that if we were party to a contract where we were being paid millions and millions of dollars, we would respond promptly to any concerns," said Richard Condit, senior counsel for the Government Accountability Project and one of the lawyers representing Busche.
"These two contractors don't seem to have any regard for those obligations at all," Condit said. "That's very troubling from a transparency standpoint, from a taxpayer standpoint."
'Deeply frustrated' on Capitol Hill
Lawmakers, too, are not happy with DOE's response to the treatment of Busche and other whistleblowers.
"We're deeply frustrated with DOE and are pushing them to stop dragging their feet on taking steps to hold these contractors accountable," said Sarah Feldman, a spokeswoman for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
McCaskill, the outgoing head of the Financial and Contracting Oversight Committee, wrote an Oct. 20 letter to Moniz requesting a briefing on the Busche investigation -- the same day the DOE IG released his decision not to make a judgement in the case.
The DOE spokeswoman confirmed that McCaskill's staff received a briefing on the Busche investigation this past Friday.
That briefing followed a hearing in March where McCaskill and other senators blasted contractors and DOE officials over the firing of Hanford whistleblowers (E&E Daily, March 12).
"The problems the IG had obtaining information from DOE contractors to investigate the firing of whistleblowers have been ongoing. The fact that this information could be withheld by a DOE contractor from the DOE's own inspector general just shows how dysfunctional DOE's whistleblower protection policies truly are," said an aide to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
Wyden also has criticized DOE on the whistleblower issue. In the meantime, DOE itself has run into legal trouble over its handling of Hanford.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) yesterday declared his plan to sue the department and one of its contractors over noxious tank fumes at the nuclear waste site (E&ENews PM, Nov. 19).
Other whistleblowers have found success outside of DOE when it comes to their cases.
A case over URS employee Walter Tamosaitis' firing after raising concerns about Hanford's planned waste treatment facility is moving forward after a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling earlier this month (E&ENews PM, Nov. 7).
Shelly Doss, another Hanford whistleblower, won a decision with the Department of Labor after her firing (Greenwire, Aug. 21).
Busche is pursuing other legal avenues, too, in response to her firing. She has two pending complaints with the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration office in Seattle, which her lawyers hope will be resolved in early 2015.
Idaho shipments arrive safely at Waste Control Specialists
KCBD
November 19, 2014
ANDREWS COUNTY, TX (KCBD) - Early this week, three shipments of contact-handled transuranic waste were transported from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to Waste Control Specialists (WCS) located near Andrews, TX. That's about 2 hours southwest of Lubbock.
WCS is serving as a temporary disposal site until all issues as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, NM are fixed.
The waste, which originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was sent to INL for additional treatment more than a year ago.
It meets the both the WIPP and WCS waste acceptance criteria and does not contain the "nitrate salts" thought to be associated with the February radiological event at WIPP.
According the Department of Energy, with the support of the State of Texas and WCS, the Department was able to move this waste and meet the milestones necessary to maintain compliance with the Idaho Settlement Agreement.
Meanwhile, two functions that are vital to recovery operations resumed this week at the WIPP site.
Over the weekend, crews resumed roof bolting operations necessary for ground control and continued safe access to many areas of the underground facility. Roof bolts, sometimes as long as 12 feet, are inserted into predrilled holes and tightened to required specifications to help secure the roof and walls of the access routes in the underground facility.
Under normal operations, roof bolts are added or replaced on a routine basis, as necessary. This is the first ground control activity to be performed since the two incidents that occurred in February. Bolting locations will be prioritized based on geotechnical engineering evaluations and recommendations.
The waste hoist has also returned to limited service, while work continues towards making it fully operational. The hoist is currently being used to transport equipment in and out of the underground facility.
Early this week the hoist was designated available for use as an "emergency egress" to evacuate the underground facility if necessary. Providing emergency egress has allowed for a significant increase in the number of workers that can be in the underground facility at one time.
Based on the availability of the waste hoist for emergency egress, the number of employees who can be in the underground facility has increased from 24 to 74.
Report: Nuclear testing remnants remain radioactive
Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 20, 2014
Radioactive remnants from decades of nuclear bomb tests remain mostly in underground detonation sites at the Nevada National Security Site.
That was the upshot of the annual environmental monitoring report presented Wednesday night by Department of Energy staff and contractors to a citizens panel known as the Nevada Site Specific Advisory Board.
"What we attempted to do is a better job of putting groundwater monitoring into one section and make it more presentable to the public," said Kathryn Knapp, a health physicist and DOE's program manager for the annual environmental report.
Knapp and other scientists discussed the 270-page monitoring report outside the meeting at the National Atomic Testing Museum. They said it will be a very long time before tritium, the primary isotope they are tracking, travels through groundwater layers and reaches any off-site water supply wells. By then, tritium will have decayed to levels considered well within the safe drinking water standard.
Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, occurs naturally in air and water, and is a first indicator of nuclear testing contamination. It is much lighter and migrates faster in the environment than plutonium or uranium particles.
"We're still sampling for all those other long-lived radionuclides. We're not seeing anything though," National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Darwin Morgan said Thursday. "It's not anything we're ignoring."
Models for one area of concern, Frenchman Flat, show radioactive contaminants traveling so slowly in groundwater that "tritium will be gone" before it could reach any wells in Amargosa Valley, said Department of Energy geologist Bill Wilborn.
"The velocity in that part of the basin is so slow, a meter per year or so or a kilometer in 1,000 years," that tritium with a half-life of 12.3 years will have decayed to safe levels, he said. A half-life is the time it takes for the radioactivity of a substance to decay to half of its initial value.
Wilborn said Frenchman Flat "is probably four or five kilometers from Mercury," the government town at the test site, "and it's even farther to community wells in Amargosa Valley."
The report covers data from 84 monitoring wells both on and off the Rhode Island-size site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The network is sampled to detect radioactive contamination from 828 below-ground nuclear tests that government scientists conducted until full-scale nuclear tests were curtailed in 1992. Most of the early tests, 100 in all, were conducted above ground, beginning with the first one at the Nevada site in 1951.
A 1963 treaty restricted nuclear tests to underground shafts or tunnel cavities. It was during this period in the early 1960s until testing ended in 1992 that hundreds of nuclear devices were set off at depths ranging from 90 to 4,800 feet below the surface. About one-third of those blasts occurred in, near or below the water table.
Tritium contamination in groundwater was first detected off-site in 2009 near where two nuclear tests -- the 1968 Benham and 1975 Tybo tests -- were conducted in Pahute Mesa in the site's northwest corner.
Scientists have predicted it will take roughly 240 years for tritium-laced water from the Benham and Tybo tests to travel another 14 miles to the nearest public water source. By then it will have decayed to non-detectable levels.
Wilborn has said the contamination plume probably won't reach Beatty, 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Instead, perhaps hundreds or 1,000 years, in his estimate, it will head between Beatty and Yucca Mountain, where the Department of Energy had planned to dispose of the nation's spent nuclear fuel.
The Obama administration has starved the Yucca Mountain Project of funding but a federal court last year ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to complete safety evaluations and proceed with licensing using what little funding remains. LANL chief denies lab hid facts from WIPP
The Santa Fe New Mexican
November 20, 2014
The head of Los Alamos National Laboratory issued a memo to employees Monday condemning a story published Sunday in The New Mexican that exposed missteps at the lab that had played a part in a WIPP radiation leak. The story also addressed efforts to downplay the dangers of LANL transuranic waste that had been sent to the nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad.
The newspaper's investigation, which took six months and included interviews and a review of thousands of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, found that LANL documents provided to Waste Isolation Pilot Plant officials and regulators about the waste drum's contents failed to mention several components: organic kitty litter, the unusually high acidity of the waste and a pH neutralizer. Now, those components are being eyed as possible factors in the chemical reaction that caused a LANL drum to burst, leading to the radiation leak.
On Feb. 14, when the drum ruptured inside the underground storage facility, more than 20 workers were exposed to radiation. The plant has not reopened since, stranding thousands of barrels of waste from Cold War-era nuclear weapons production at national labs throughout the country. Fully reopening WIPP is expected to take up to five years and cost at least $550 million, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
"Over the weekend, many of you may have read a story in the Santa Fe New Mexican suggesting that Los Alamos National Laboratory was hiding scientific theories about the accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant," lab Director Charles McMillan wrote in his memo sent to LANL employees just before 5 p.m. Monday. "I want to assure you that nothing is further from the truth."
According to McMillan's statement, obtained by The New Mexican, he took aim at a portion of the newspaper report about the lab's delay in sharing a memo with WIPP personnel that likened the contents of the burst waste drum to explosives. The story reported that a May memo by LANL chemist Steve Clemmons asserted he had determined the waste in the drum that ruptured held the same components as three patented explosives.
"The Lab was very open with the Department of Energy and the Carlsbad Field Office about hypotheses under evaluation, with daily discussions on all efforts to discover the cause of the breach and to ensure the safety and security of the remaining drums," McMillan wrote in the memo to lab workers Monday.
But emails that were the basis for the news report contradict McMillan's memo. Those messages, colored at times by outrage from WIPP officials about what they weren't told by LANL, show that despite daily briefings between WIPP and Los Alamos personnel about the ongoing investigations into the leak, a week passed before WIPP officials learned of Clemmons' findings about the potentially explosive mixture in the waste.
Officials at WIPP became aware of Clemmons' memo only after a Department of Energy employee at LANL leaked it to a colleague in Carlsbad, who then shared it with them. The discovery prompted decision-makers at WIPP to postpone a scheduled expedition by employees to collect specimens for scientific testing in the area where the drum burst.
Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety program at a watchdog organization, the Southwest Research and Information Center, has read the string of emails about the May memo. He said the story the messages tell is clear: "The LANL people were not being truthful with WIPP and DOE folks in May," Hancock said. "That's a problem."
Greg Mello, executive director of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group that monitors the lab, has read the emails and shares Hancock's opinion that LANL was not as forthcoming with WIPP or the Energy Department as McMillan's memo suggests.
"The director is trying to protect the morale of the laboratory," Mello said. "I think it's wishful thinking. He says the lab was open with the DOE and with WIPP. It wasn't open, but perhaps by LANL standards it was. LANL openness standards are so opaque that secrecy is normal."
As reported Sunday in The New Mexican, the lab last week issued a statement that scientific experiments eliminated Clemmons' findings as the cause of the radiation leak at WIPP.
Other portions of McMillan's message to lab employees supported findings from the news report. He acknowledged the lab had not accurately documented the contents of the waste drum that ruptured, and that the waste in the drum that burst had been processed at the lab. The addition of neutralizer was not authorized by a permit issued by the New Mexico Environment Department.
McMillan's memo made no mention of a theory discussed in emails that organic kitty litter had been added to the waste as an absorbent -- rather than the inorganic clay kitty litter that previously had been used -- because of a typographical error in a revision to a manual that instructs workers how to package waste at the lab.
"McMillan's memo doesn't mention that this mixture violated basic chemical common sense," said Mello, a former state environmental inspector whose duties included observing activities at the lab. "Nobody should mix these things -- period. You should never mix nitric acid and nitrate salts with any organic fuels."
Investigators have identified wheat-based kitty litter as a potential fuel in the chemical reaction that led to the radiation leak. The lab began using the organic variety in September 2012.
The month before the switch, a new waste packaging policy that explicitly called for organic litter took effect at the lab. A waste handling expert at WIPP reported in an email to a colleague that a typographical error is believed to have resulted in the change.
The lab has repeatedly refused to publicly say why it switched to organic kitty litter. The lab did not respond Thursday when asked why McMillan's memo did not address the typo theory.
More eyes on WIPP leak
The Albuquerque Journal
November 22, 2014
TAOS - State regulators want an independent review of the Department of Energy's findings on what caused a radioactive leak that has shut down the nation's underground nuclear waste dump in southern New Mexico.
New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn said Friday that the state has no reason to doubt the "veracity" of DOE's efforts, but that it can't be overlooked that DOE "is investigating itself" when it comes to the February breach of a waste drum from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"We will not simply rely on the DOE's own conclusions," said Flynn. He said an independent review is "critical to giving the public confidence that we have in fact established exactly what has occurred" at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
He said at a Taos meeting of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities that the DOE has agreed to fund a "peer review" of what caused the leak, led by physicist Van Romero, New Mexico Tech's vice president for research and economic development. Romero is supposed to get access to all data from DOE's own investigations.
Flynn said the Environment Department itself continues to actively investigate the WIPP leak, focusing on regulatory and communications issues, while Romero will bring expertise to the question of how the chemical reaction that caused the drum to breach took place.
Earlier this week, LANL director Charlie McMillan used a message to lab employees to denounce a published report that exposed missteps at the lab that played a part in the radiation leak at WIPP.
McMillan's memo dismissed suggestions that the lab was withholding scientific theories about the Feb. 14 accident. "I want to assure you that nothing is further from the truth, " he said in the memo, which the Journal obtained on Friday.
McMillan was taking aim at a report by the Santa Fe New Mexican, based on interviews and thousands of documents and emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the emails that were uncovered expressed outrage from WIPP officials about what they weren't told by the Los Alamos lab after the leak took place.
The New Mexican's report also addressed efforts to downplay the dangers of waste from Los Alamos that had been sent to WIPP.
McMillan's memo to employees maintained that the lab had been "very open" with the DOE and the Carlsbad Field Office "with daily discussions on all efforts to discover the cause of the breach and to ensure the safety and security of the remaining drums."
The New Mexican report cited a memo by a LANL chemist from three months after the leak saying the contents of the breached drum matched those of patented explosives. That information wasn't passed to WIPP personnel for a week and WIPP only got word after a DOE employee leaked the memo to someone in Carlsbad, the newspaper reported.
According to documents provided by the lab to WIPP officials and regulators, some details about the canister's contents were not immediately shared, including the unusually high acidity of the waste and that wheat-based cat litter, instead of clay-based litter previously used to absorb liquids, and a pH neutralizer were part of the mix. The mixture of the kitty litter and nitrates in the drum has been a prominent theory for what caused the chemical reaction.
The leak contaminated 22 workers at WIPP and forced the indefinite closure of the nuclear waste repository. Resuming full operations could take years, at a cost estimated at more than $500 million.
A report released last month by DOE's inspector general squarely placed blame for the WIPP shutdown on failures at LANL. The department is expected to release a final report on what caused the leak by year's end.
State fines coming
Flynn's department is expected to impose big fines on LANL soon. He said in Taos on Friday that "there has to be significant liability" for the WIPP leak and the lab's failure to meet broader waste clean-up deadlines set by the state.
Flynn said a DOE official recently suggested that fines would be inappropriate because the fine payments would just come from money the federal government provides for clean-up of "legacy" waste at Los Alamos.
"If I can't fine them or hold them accountable, why am I here?" Flynn asked. He said he believes there are ways to keep fines from depleting clean-up money, through wording in appropriations or requiring clean-up action milestones. The lab is run for DOE by a private contractor, Los Alamos National Security LLC.
Flynn also said it would be "unacceptable" for DOE to take money to fix WIPP from the lab's clean-up funding. In that case, he said, "you're not punishing the people who caused the problem, you're punishing the people of New Mexico who benefit from the environmental clean-up work."
In another development, DOE recently announced the start of yet another probe of LANL's role in the leak, this one by the department's Office of Enterprise Assessment, which also can assess fines.
Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories
November 24, 2014
Federal Register
Meeting Date: Monday, December 15, 2014 10am-330pm
Background: The Commission was established to provide advice to the Secretary on the Department's national laboratories. The Commission will review the DOE national laboratories for alignment with the Department's strategic priorities, clear and balanced missions, unique capabilities to meet current energy and national security challenges, appropriate size to meet the Department's energy and national security missions, and support of other Federal agencies. The Commission will also look for opportunities to more effectively and efficiently use the capabilities of the national laboratories and review the use of laboratory directed research and development (LDRD) to meet the Department's science, energy, and national security goals.
Purpose of the Meeting: This meeting is the fourth meeting of the Commission.
Tentative Agenda: The meeting will start at 10:00 a.m. on December 15. The tentative meeting agenda includes discussion on how the DOE Labs impact the national science and technology enterprise and further discussions on their relationship with industry. Key presenters will address and discuss these topics with comments from the public. The meeting will conclude at 3:30 p.m. The agenda will be posted when finalized and in advance of the meeting on the Lab Commission Web site: (http://energy.gov/labcommission/commission-review-effectiveness-national-energy-laboratories). |
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