[DSE
LETTERHEAD]
April 9, 2007
The Honorable A. J. Eggenberger
Chairman
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
625 Indiana Avenue, NW, Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20004
Dear Mr. Chairman:
Thank you for your January 18, 2007, letter
to Secretary Bodman requesting both a report and a briefing covering the
following subjects: (1) the risks and
priority associated with transuranic waste (TRU) operations at Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL); (2) the pathway for shipping the above-ground high
activity drums to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) or actions to improve
the safety posture at Area G where above-ground TRU is currently stored;
and, (3) the strategy for retrieval and shipment of TRU stored below ground at
LANL.
In response to the Board’s request, the National
Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Los Alamos Site Office has worked with
NNSA’s contractor, Los Alamos National Security, to develop the enclosed report
as well as the briefing that was provided to the Board on March 1, 2007.
NNSA and the Department of Energy recognize that a significant and timely reduction of the risks posed by the above-ground
storage of TRU waste at Area G via
the shipment of high activity TRU to
WIPP can best be accomplished through the temporary acceptance, for one year,
of increased operational risk to repackage higher activity drums at LANL’s Waste
Characterization, Reduction and Repackaging facility and to ship higher
activity drums via the Radioassay and Non-Destructive
Testing facility. These risks can be mitigated
in part through the completion
by LANL of proposed safety
modifications to these facilities prior to the resumption of operations.
This will allow LANL to dispose of an
estimated 235 out of the 325 highest risk drums by January 2008. This, combined with the lower-activity
inventory scheduled for disposal, will total at least 33,000 Plutonium
Equivalent Curies (PE-Ci) planned to
be shipped from LANL to WIPP
between October 1, 2006, and January 31, 2008. The
remaining above-ground TRU waste, which will include approximately seven drums
of 300-800 PE-Ci combustible, high activity TRU and 83 solids drums, will be
placed in a safe storage configuration until the high
activity waste stored below ground is retrieved and processed for disposition
beginning in FY 2009.
If you have questions, please contact me or Mr. James McConnell, Chief,
Defense Nuclear Safety for NNSA, at (202) 586-4379 or Ms. Alice Williams,
NNSA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Infrastructure and Environment, at
(202) 586-6847.
Sincerely,
Clay Sell