Los Alamos National Laboratory works to address water contamination, accidents reported

A plan to address groundwater pollution took shape at Los Alamos National Laboratory as the facility works to clean up a plume of contaminated water in the area.

Work to extract, treat and reinject the water recently entered full operation, per an announcement from The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) Los Alamos Field Office.

Three extraction wells were brought online, along with two for injection of the treated groundwater along the eastern portion of a plume of water contaminated with hexavalent chromium.

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The new wells brought the project to five extraction and five injection wells.

The “interim” measure operated since 2018 along the southern edge of the plume, the release read, only pausing for maintenance, and seeing short suspension due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s located beneath the Sandia and Mortandad canyons near the boundary between the lab and the Pueblo de San Ildefonso.

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Since the work began, concentrations of hexavalent chromium in portions of the plume were lowered below the State standard of 50 parts per billion, moving the edge of the plume about 500 feet away from the boundary.

The contaminated water is pumped from a regional aquifer through the extraction wells and is and piped to a treatment facility where the chromium is removed.

From there, the water is piped to injection wells along the edge of the plume and re-injected into the ground.

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More than 30 monitoring wells were installed around the plume to test for chromium levels and detect if the contamination was moving toward Los Alamos County’s water supply wells. Since they were installed in 2007, the wells never detected any contamination that could put the local community at risk, read the release.

The contamination was created by a non-nuclear power plant at the lab that flushed contaminated water periodically between 1956 and 1972, records show, from the plant’s cooling towers into Sandia Canyon.

Chromium was in the past used as a corrosion inhibitor.

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Treatment and reinjection of the water is part of the lab’s efforts to comply with a consent order – an agreement between the lab and State of New Mexico calling for the lab to clean up waste at the site dating back to 1999.

“While we have a number of environmental remediation activities underway as part of the Consent Order with NMED, the effort to pull back the plume from the laboratory’s boundary with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso has been our highest Consent Order priority,” said Cheryl Rodriguez, federal cleanup director with EM’s Los Alamos Field Office.

“We look forward to seeing the impact of the full implementation of the interim measure.”

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The State of New Mexico recently took the federal government to court, seeking to terminate the consent order with the lab after citing its failure to clean up waste and repeated requests for extensions when deadlines were missed.

The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) sought civil penalties and court-supervised negotiations to set proper targets for cleanup, after a revision submitted by the DOE this year was deemed “inadequate” as it would push clean up past its final deadline of 2036.

“NMED will vigorously pursue this matter to ensure timely clean-up of legacy contamination that New Mexicans deserve through a comprehensive, expeditious and enforceable clean-up plan at LANL,” read a statement from the NMED.”

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Numerous accidents reported at Los Alamos National Laboratory

In March, an incident where a drum of transuranic waste at the lab was seen sparking after a flammable material reacted with oxygen, was reported and an investigation was conducted by NMED.

Shipments of waste for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant were paused and WIPP was temporarily evacuated as similarly-packaged drums were known to have been emplaced in the underground.

An April 16 report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board showed an assessment of the incident was caused by workers not recognizing that welding titanium in a glovebox could generate flammable fumes and that waste characterization process at the lab failed to prohibit such activities.

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“In our opinion, the second root cause and the associated contributing causes presented by the team demonstrate flaws in the corrective actions taken to enhance the acceptable knowledge program following the 2014 radiological release event at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” read the board’s report.

Earlier in April, a worker at the lab jammed a water valve, per another report from the board, leading to 1,800 gallons of water spilling in a corridor.

Alarms failed to trigger, the report read, and the spill was found by a radiological control technician hours later.  

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The valve was closed immediately, the report read, and no spread of radioactive contamination was reported.

“Facility management has proposed many corrective actions to prevent recurrence including reviewing their alarms, evaluating an overflow line to a sump, and reviewing their fill procedure,” read the report.

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-618-7631, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.