Laboratory team recognized Tuesday at White House ceremony

Contact: Jim Danneskiold, jdanneskiold@lanl.gov, (505) 667-1640 (02-069)

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 12, 2002 -- A team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos National Laboratory that devised a unique way to eliminate acid waste at Los Alamos' plutonium facility was recognized Tuesday at the White House.

Team members Aquilino Valdez, Ronald Chavez, Benjie T. Martinez and Don Mullins, all of the Actinide Process Chemistry Group, traveled to Washington, D.C., to pick up a 2002 White House Closing the Circle Award in the Recycling category for their work.

The Nitric Acid Recovery System also won a Department of Energy Pollution Prevention Award.

The White House Closing the Awards program is a national competition among all federal agencies, while the DOE Pollution Prevention Award is based on a DOE complexwide competition. Both awards acknowledge pollution prevention, recycling and affirmative procurement accomplishments.

A common chemical process at Technical Area 55 is purifying plutonium by dissolving it in nitric acid. In the past, the dissolved solution passed through a series of columns, and most of the plutonium was recovered from the solution. Then the liquid waste, contaminated with nitrates, was piped to the Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility at TA-50 and condensed. There, the acid was neutralized, and the plutonium stabilized for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Faced with increasingly stringent regulations governing discharges of nitrates from TA-50, the Laboratory needed to drastically reduce the waste stream from the nitric acid dissolution process.

The team's solution was simple: eliminate nearly all the nitrate discharges to the treatment plant. Beginning last April, the Nitric Acid Recovery System almost eliminated nitrates in the waste stream, and reduced the nitric acid used in processing operations to about 20 percent of the historic usage. The wastewater stream is now 99.98 percent pure water, with no measurable plutonium.

The system recovers nitric acid through fractional distillation, which separates chemicals with different boiling points. Water boils at a lower temperature than nitric acid, so almost pure water is removed from the top of the distillation column, while the reconcentrated nitric acid from the bottom of the column is reused.

The system took nearly four years to develop.

Agencies across the federal government submitted 245 nominations for this year's 26 White House Closing the Circle awards. The honors are given out in seven categories: Affirmative Procurement; Education and Outreach; Environmental Management Systems/Life Cycle Assessment/Environmental Cost Accounting; Model Facility Demonstrations; Recycling; and Waste/Pollution Prevention. Many of the nominations were screened prior to initial judging by individual agencies, after which 16 judges, from academia, industry and government agencies made the final selections.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission.

Los Alamos enhances global security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, developing technical solutions to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and national security concerns.

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