The city of Santa Fe, N.M., on Sept. 16 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 (LANL).
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 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 remediation, though officials identified no specific remedy. One option, far more costly than cap-and-cover, is cleanup 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, appointed by New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) to permanently head the department Sept. 12, 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, 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.
The citizens group Nuclear Watch New Mexico pounced on the proposal for omitting any mention of legacy waste buried beneath Area G, which although similar to waste the Office of Environmental Management is responsible for cleaning up is not legally the office’s responsibility.
The estimate just released “intentionally omits any mention of approximately 150,000 cubic meters of poorly characterized radioactive and toxic wastes just at Area G (LANL’s largest waste dump) alone, an amount of wastes 30 times larger than DOE acknowledges in the 2016 Lifecycle Cost Estimate,” NukeWatch wrote in a Wednesday press release. “Instead of being a tool for additional dollars for genuine, comprehensive cleanup, the 2016 Lifecycle Cost Estimate Summary is a DOE ploy to avoid cleaning up more than 90% of all wastes at LANL.”
The buried waste at Area G is, which is slated for now to remain buried, is little discussed outside local and Environmental Management circles. Part of the difficulty in establishing a cleanup strategy for the material stems from its location in Area G: a waste-processing facility the National Nuclear Security Administration is expected to need for some time to decontaminate and package transuranic waste generated by what is expected to be a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization effort soon to get under way at LANL and other defense nuclear sites.
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.
