Transforming environmental performance through inventory, assessment, and validation: a case study of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Waste Compliance and Tracking System

The optimal performance of environmental, safety, and health systems is essential to the mission success of the US Department of Energy laboratories. With the velocity and scale of information needs in supporting legacy and ongoing waste operations, how do decisionmakers, data users, and stakeholders know that the stated metrics and analytics reflect on the ground conditions? To address an important set of unverified field settings, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Waste Compliance and Tracking System (WCATS) Wall-to-Wall Team performed an unprecedented and innovative inventory. This reconciliation involved confirmation analysis for approximately 5850 hazardous, low-level, mixed low-level, and transuranic waste containers located in more than 200 staging and storage areas across 33 technical areas. The interdisciplinary team scoped, planned, and developed the multidimensional assessments. Through coordination with cross-functional site hosts, they were able to ground truth, verify, and validate data while resolving discrepancies identified in WCATS. The results were extraordinary with an authenticated and updated waste inventory, an improved outreach program, an advanced communications network, and timely closed-loop feedbacks toward more adaptive and resilient systems.