The city of Santa Fe, N.M., on Friday made public a Department of Energy report that says it will take about 20 years and cost up to $4 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to clean up some 5,000 cubic meters of Cold War-era nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It is the first time the 46-page report by EM’s Los Alamos Field Office has been released to the public, though not the first time the controversial cost and schedule estimates within have been discussed in the public sphere.
In June, the New Mexico Environment Department said DOE’s projection was about $1 billion too low, because the federal government assumed some Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) waste could be left where it lies and covered up to bottle in radioactive contamination: a relatively cheap solution known as cap-and-cover. The state signaled then it might prefer a more thorough cleaning up, though officials identified no specific remedy. One option, far more costly than cap-and-cover, is remediation to a state known as “residential screening level:” a designation that means the post-cleanup land would be safe enough for a new house.
On Monday, New Mexico Environment Secretary Butch Tongate said some of the assumptions baked into DOE’s cost estimate amount to opening salvos in the annual negotiations over the Los Alamos cleanup schedule, as mandated by a new consent order the state and DOE signed this summer.
“Any such assumption is subject to change and modification going forward, and NMED uses that reference point only as one of multiple information sources and considerations regarding the selection of final remedies at sites such as Material Disposal Area G at LANL,” Tongate wrote in the statement.
In the report the city of Santa Fe shared Friday, titled “Environmental Waste Cleanup Los Alamos National Laboratory 2016 Lifecycle Cost Estimate,” the cap-and-cover approach remained in place. Using that tactic, it would take until 2035 or 2040 to clean up the 5,000 cubic meters of Los Alamos legacy waste for which EM is now responsible, and cost between $3 billion and $4 billion, according to the report. The waste includes a chromium plume that has contaminated soil at and nearby the lab, and rad-contaminated equipment left over from Cold War weapons development.
The lab’s highly contaminated Area G transuranic waste disposal area would take the longest and cost the most of any single cleanup project: between $240 million and $355 million or so, with an estimated end date between 2035 and 2040, the report says. That assumes a cap-and-cover approach.
DOE and state officials are scheduled to discuss the LANL cleanup schedule publicly Sept. 28 in Las Vegas, N.M., at a meeting of the DOE-chartered Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board. The state and the agency will meet privately after federal budget levels for fiscal 2017 are known. A stopgap spending measure to extend current spending levels into early December is in the works in Washington now. In January, DOE and New Mexico are scheduled to hold a public meeting to discuss any schedule changes for LANL cleanup they agree to.
