Lab achieves wastewater milestone

January 3, 2012—Millions of gallons of industrial wastewater will be recycled at LANL due to a long-term strategy to treat wastewater rather than discharging it into the environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which issues permits for industrial and sanitary wastewater discharges, recently approved the removal of four more outfalls from the Lab’s permit. (An outfall is where wastewater from Lab operations is discharged down canyons.) Only 11 outfalls remain, down from 141 in 1993.

"One of the institutional goals of our Environmental Management System is to have zero liquid discharge by 2012," said Dennis Hjeresen, division leader for Environmental Protection. "Removing four more facilities from our permit is an important step toward reaching that goal."

The wastewater is generated from some of the facilities responsible for the Lab’s biggest missions, such as the cooling towers of the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, one of the Lab’s premier science research facilities, and the Strategic Computing Complex, which creates world-class, high-performance computing production systems.

The Environmental Protection Division’s Water Quality team worked closely with the facilities to create a master plan that will divert treated sanitary wastewater and water flushed from cooling towers to the Sanitary Effluent Reclamation Facility (SERF).

This treated wastewater will then be reused in cooling towers around the Lab. “We’ve been working on this since 2006 and the SERF should be recycling up to 300,000 gallons per day by the summer of 2012,” Hjeresen said.

The Lab’s Environmental Management System provides a framework for environmental compliance, pollution prevention, and continual improvement in environmental performance.