Even at almost $4 billion, the Department of Energy underestimates the cost of cleaning up decades worth of accumulated defense nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico’s Environment Department said Thursday.
“DOE’s lifecycle baseline estimate is $3.8 billion, which we believe to be conservative,” a spokesperson for state Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said by email.
Flynn himself said as much at a Wednesday meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, a day after the public comment period closed on the state’s expansive new set of proposed rules for federal cleanup at the 73 year-old lab.
The draft revised consent order between the Energy Department and New Mexico would amend a 2005 agreement that remains in force until DOE and the state formalize the state-authored changes.
The New Mexico spokesperson did not say how long the entire LANL cleanup would take, but DOE thinks the 10 years beginning in 2017 will cost $1.7 billion or so. That is the estimated value of the Los Alamos legacy cleanup contract, which covers waste accumulated between 1970 and 1998 and is expected to go out for bid later this year. The new deal will kick in Oct. 1, 2017, when the current cleanup pact held by lab management and operations contractor Los Alamos National Security expires. Cleanup costs under the current “bridge” contract averaged about $155 million a year.
The biggest change the state proposes for LANL cleanup, in the new rules that have to come into force, is the so-called campaign approach that would require DOE to finish cleaning up certain parts of LANL before moving on to others. Under the current agreement, DOE and Los Alamos National Security are essentially working every cleanup on the site simultaneously.
The timetable for finalizing the consent order depends on which, if any, changes New Mexico makes to the draft in response to the public comments.
“We have to finish with the comments and finish analyzing them before we really know what comes next and what the timeline is,” the Environment Department spokesperson said. “We don’t have a calendar with the specific next steps.”
In late March, when the state released the draft revised consent order, Flynn said July 4 would be a “good target” for finalizing the new agreement.
DOE knew it would blow the Dec. 6, 2015, legacy cleanup deadline in the 2005 consent order years before the milestone passed, but early attempts to negotiate a new deadline went off the rails after an improperly sealed barrel of transuranic waste from LANL burst open and leaked radiation at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2014.
DOE settled up with New Mexico over the accident, and an unrelated underground fire at WIPP, in January, to the tune of $74 million.
The nonprofit group Nuclear Watch New Mexico opposes the new draft consent order, while the DOE-chartered, locally staffed Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board supports the new framework.
