Lab operator receives even more time for cleanup work

Feds OK 6-month, $65 million extension

The federal government has granted Los Alamos National Security LLC an additional six-month, $65 million contract to continue overseeing environmental cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is the lab operator’s second contract extension this year for the cleanup work.

Tuesday’s announcement from the U.S. Department of Energy comes four days before the current environmental cleanup contract was set to expire and the lab was expected to have a new cleanup contractor in place.

In its statement, the Department of Energy said the contract extension will allow LANS to finish its current cleanup projects with “the least amount of disruption” and will allow the department more time to pick a new company to manage environmental cleanup at the lab in the future.

Los Alamos National Security, a private, for-profit consortium including the University of California, Bechtel, BWXT and URS, an AECOM company, has managed the lab since 2006. Following a series of critical federal reports, the Department of Energy announced in December 2015 that it would not renew LANS’ more than $2 billion annual lab operating contract, and instead would initiate a bid process, with a goal of having a new operator in place this month.

Early last year, the National Nuclear Security Administration agreed to extend LANS’ operating contract another year, until September 2018, to allow the lab more time to transition to new management. Cleanup, however, was supposed to move to a new contractor in March. But LANS was granted an extension, with a plan to have new management take over the roughly $200 million annual environmental management contract in October. The newly announced cleanup contract extension for LANS will last through March 2018.

The decision to end LANS’ operating contract came after a slew of scathing federal reports and performance evaluations related to management failures, which fed-

eral inspectors said could lead to unsafe work conditions and serious accidents. Among them was the mispackaging of a waste drum that burst at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico in 2014, releasing radiation and resulting in one of the most costly nuclear accidents in history.

And in 2015, an electrical arc flash harmed a number of workers at the lab, including one man who was hospitalized with burns all over his body.

The lab’s environmental management contractor is responsible for removing waste and remediating contamination created by the lab prior to 1999. This includes a mile-long underground plume of hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen, which sits at the top of the regional aquifer and is the result of decades of negligent waste management practices at the lab until the 1970s.

The contractor also is responsible for managing vast amounts of hazardous and radioactive waste buried in deep and shallow pits across miles of lab property, as well as for repackaging and shipping above-ground waste, including dozens of drums that have the same explosive potential as the drum that burst at WIPP.