The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has determined it has jurisdiction over the Mixed Waste Landfill at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, but will forgo oversight of the facility, DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery said in an Oct. 27 letter to a nongovernmental watchdog organization.
The closed landfill covers 2.6 acres at the Department of Energy facility in northern New Mexico. It accepted low-level and mixed waste from 1959 to 1988, according to the New Mexico Environment Department. A vegetative cover was installed over the site in 2009.
David McCoy, executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, says the Mixed Waste Landfill contains “atomic bomb waste disposal from the Nevada Test Site, Kwajalein, Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute (ITRI), thousands of neutron triggers, and Sandia lab weapon experiments.” That is according to a Sept. 15 letter he sent to the DNFSB, a copy of which he also provided to Weapons Complex Monitor.
“The [Mixed Waste Landfill] dump had canisters containing metallic sodium and melted fuel pins disposed in shallow, unlined pits and trenches from nuclear reactor meltdown experiments conducted at Sandia,” McCoy wrote in a Nov. 5 email. “DOE/Sandia have not revealed quantities or locations for the canisters disposed of in the [Mixed Waste Landfill].”
McCoy said the waste poses a threat to area groundwater and called for the landfill to be excavated.
Connery, in her public reply to two letters this year from McCoy, said the landfill is a defense nuclear facility that would fall under board jurisdiction. The DNFSB, in consultation with the Energy Department, determined that the landfill held roughly 6,300 curies of radioactivity during disposal, that the cap is more than 4 feet in depth, that there is no known groundwater contamination, and that there is no documentation showing disposal of bulk metallic sodium, Connery wrote in her letter to McCoy.
A recent DOE Inspector General’s Office evaluation also determined there was no indication that high-level waste had been buried in the landfill, the DNFSB chair said.
“Even though the jurisdictional predicate is established, we must prioritize when and where to exercise our oversight function. The Board focuses on defense nuclear facilities that are operational and pose the highest risk,” Connery wrote. “The Board is also aware of the comprehensive state and federal regulatory activity directed at the MWL. Given these facts, the Board has decided not to apply oversight resources to the MWL at this time.”
Connery added that the board could reconsider its decision based on any new information regarding the landfill’s disposal history or if the Department of Energy excavates the site.
The independent DNFSB has an annual budget of about $29 million and employs roughly 110 staff personnel. It is tasked with monitoring public health and safety issues at Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities across the nation, including the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Pantex Plant in Texas, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
