Cases of COVID-19 within the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management remained low during the past week, with 27 active confirmed cases of the virus reported, a spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
That is up six from the prior week total of 21 but far below the hundreds being recorded weekly during the late-winter omicron variant surge. The DOE has recently narrowed the way it counts cases, no longer including cases among telecommuting workers.
An Environmental Management official said at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix last month that more than 100 federal employees and cleanup contractor workers in the complex have died during the pandemic. Nearly 985,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic took root in the United States in early 2020, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
A federal magistrate has given the Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department 90 more days, until July 5, to try and settle ongoing litigation over a 2016 consent order governing legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Saying progress was apparently being made in settlement negotiations, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Robbenhaar in New Mexico said in a Tuesday ruling. Most recently the parties discussed a new framework for settlement during a March 18 meeting, the parties said in a joint status report filed this week. The parties received an earlier three-month extension in January.
The state sued DOE, in a case removed to federal court from state court in March 2021, seeking to terminate the 2016 consent order on Los Alamos cleanup. The 2016 order replaced a 2005 version that environmental groups consider superior. Another case surrounding the 2016 consent order was settled last month by DOE and a citizen advocacy group, Nuclear Watch New Mexico. That settlement speeds certain cleanup work at Los Alamos.
The New Mexico-based Los Alamos Study Group filed suit Wednesday against the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, D.C., claiming the semi-autonomous Department of Energy agency is violating the Freedom of Information Act when it comes to plans for expanded plutonium pit production.
The Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group has made 65 requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in recent times, many surrounding National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans for a multi-billion-dollar investment in pit production at both the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleges NNSA has a pattern and practice of violation of FOIA. The New Mexico advocacy group also said NNSA has provided no basis for failure to properly comply with federal disclosure laws.
“NNSA has been flagrantly violating the Freedom of Information Act for years,” said study group director Greg Mello in a press release. “In this litigation, we hope not only to drag these important documents into the sunshine of public and congressional scrutiny, but also to foster FOIA compliance at NNSA more broadly.”
