An expert review team led by Inés Triay, a former head of the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch, hopes to have most of its research done by this fall on a chromium plume at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“We think we can finish this endeavor by the end of the summer,” Triay said of the fact-finding. Triay gave an online presentation Thursday during a meeting organized by DOE’s legacy cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT (N3B) Los Alamos.

After the fact-finding is done, the panel members must discuss the issues among themselves and produce a report for the state and DOE later this year, Triay said. 

Triay, currently interim dean of the College of Engineering and Computing at Florida International University, leads the 15-member panel that includes experts from universities, national laboratories and industry.

On Dec. 19, DOE and the New Mexico Environment Department sent a letter requesting the panel to conduct an independent review on Chromium Interim Measures and Plume Characterization. 

“We have experts on geology, on hydrology, on geochemistry, on drilling,” Triay said. The purpose of the review is to assess the interim measures DOE has used, modeling using to assess the scope and location of the plume and additional proposed corrective actions, she said. 

The panel will also work to gain the necessary information to come up with a final remedy for the plume in Mortandad Canyon. The plume dates back to chemicals used to clean corrosion from cooling towers at a Los Alamos power plant between 1956 and 1972.

A little more than a year ago, the state ordered the feds to stop injecting treated groundwater into the plume itself. DOE, however, believes the practice has enabled it to bottle up the plume several-hundred feet before it reaches tribal land, Ellie Gilbertson, DOE Environmental Management’s acting Los Alamos field office manager, said Thursday.

State and federal talks, with input from tribal leaders, have occurred on restarting the injections on an interim basis, but no deal has been reached yet, Gilbertson said. 

“We saw some increases in chromium” in a monitoring well in late 2020 that led the state to suspend the DOE injections, said John Rhoderick, director of water protection for the New Mexico Environment Department.

Despite the state-federal disagreement, both Rhoderick and Gilbertson said the agencies are working together well. Rhoderick said both sides agree there are “data gaps” on the plume. Because the plume is 1,000 feet underground it cannot be directly observed and this poses challenges, Gilbertson said. 

Current measurements estimate the plume is a mile long and a half-mile wide, according to a DOE-N3B data sheet. 

Triay was DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management between 2009 and 2011, leading what was then a $6-billion cleanup program for Cold War and Manhattan Project sites.

Editor’s note: Tenth graph modified at 7:10 Eastern Time on April 23 to correct a job title.