UC Vice President for National Laboratories Kim Budil speaks to RCLC Board members Friday at Okway Owingeh Casino Resort Hotel. Photo by Maire O’Neill/ladailypost.com
By MAIRE O’NEILL
Los Alamos Daily Post
University of California Vice President for National Laboratories Kim Budil told Regional Coalition of LANL Communities Board members during its meeting Friday at Ohkay Owingeh Casino Resort Hotel that circumstances on the ground are much better at Los Alamos National Laboratory since the incident in 2014 that caused the closure of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.
She said the teams are now much better integrated and that the University and its private sector partners are really working hand in hand.
Budil’s comments were made in response to questions from Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales who is the outgoing Coalition chair. Gonzales told Budil there is clearly a lot of disappointment with the mistakes that were made in Los Alamos over the past couple of years that led to the shutdown of WIPP, the storage of waste and the threat that it ultimately posed to the community.
“I’m interested in how UC responded during that … what level of assurance as communities would we get if you are ultimately selected that it wouldn’t happen again or at least that there would be a lot of other protocols in place to correct it?” Gonzales asked.
Gonzales said it has been his impression that IC has been more of a passive participant than an active partner.
“It seems to me that there’s missed opportunities for the northern part of the state to benefit from the University of California here – addressing issues, be it poverty, air quality, you name it. The issues facing our northern New Mexico region have not really changed unfortunately since the UC came here,” he said. “There are still families that are struggling, big challenges with poverty, opioid addiction and all these other things that you shouldn’t necessarily have to solve on your own being a contractor. But quite honestly, donating money to a foundation and feeling like that might be the end of the obligation is not necessarily what I consider a good corporate citizen.”
Gonzales said he would be interested in the role of UC in protecting the communities when it comes to the issues of risk associated with remediation of legacy waste.
“The threat continues to move closer to San Ildefonso Pueblo and yet we find ourselves going to Washington alone advocating for more clean-up money when it would be great to have UC or some of the researchers saying you’d better invest because there are going to be some real health issues on the legacy issues that aren’t being addressed,” Gonzales told Budil. “You’ve been a part of our community. You’re asking to be part of our community moving forward. Those are the issues that are important to us.”
Budil responded that UC has been at Los Alamos since 1943 and that expectations for the M&O contractor over time have changed a lot and UC has had to change and evolve in response to that.
“There are three major epochs of the University with the Laboratory. There’s the first period where frankly the expectations for the M&O contractor were to act as a magnet for talent to the Laboratory so the opportunity to be an employee of the University of California was important, to bring the scientific community to the Laboratory and maintain that level of excellence through time,” Budil said.
She said as the external world changed, the expectations people had around safety and security changed over time.
“The expectations for the contract changed commensurately and began to get greater and greater and the University was required to and did step up and engage more in the hands on operation of the Laboratory,” Budil said. “The second major epoch really comes with the last contract transition and the shift to LANS where there was a strong recognition that bringing in expertise from the private sector would be critically important to taking advantage of best practices and knowledge being developed in the outside world.”
Budil said the Laboratories in general, not particular to Los Alamos, tend to be very insular places and that for a long time the sense that if it didn’t happen within the boundaries of the Laboratory it didn’t happen was very pervasive. She said she thinks it has changed quite dramatically so UC entered into a partnership to try to understand how to bring together the strengths of the University and the strengths of the private sector.
“Some aspects of that worked exceptionally well and some aspects of that did not work as intended. So I think what happened with the WIPP incident is a good example of how we’ve adapted and improved our performance because it highlighted for us several of the shortcomings, how we could build the partnership and how we were operating within the Laboratory,” she said.
Budil said there was a disconnect in the organization between some of the scientific and technical expertise of the Laboratory and the operational component that was trying to package and transport the waste off the site on a very aggressive budget schedule acknowledging the commitments that had been made to the State of New Mexico.
“So all parties were acting in good faith, trying very hard to meet these external commitments and what happened was the people who had the deep chemistry expertise of this nuclear waste weren’t necessarily deeply embedded in the operational aspects,” she said.
Budil said the message to UC was that they can’t be a passive partner in the operation of the Laboratory, that the University and private sector partners have to work very closely hand in hand on all aspects of Laboratory operations.
“It’s not operations and science; those things have to come together in a very seamless way. So my team and I have spent the last four years becoming deeply expert about nuclear waste disposition, capital projects construction and safety in nuclear facilities because it is important that we understand both sides of that equation,” she said. “I think you will see in the way the work is proceeding today the successes we’ve had in recovering those processes and completing the re-remediation of the nitrate salt waste that those lessons have really borne fruit at the Laboratory.”
While admitting that it’s not a “perfectly evolved system”, Budil said there are operational upsets but she thinks they have responded “vigorously and very constructively” in partnership with the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to really advance the Laboratory and really make the operations much better than it was.
