After three years of litigation, the Department of Energy and the administration of Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) settled on a new agreement for cleaning up legacy radioactive waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The New Mexico Environment Department announced the agreement last week in a press release.
The new accord bears some similarities to the 2016 accord it replaced, including the use of what the parties in the consent order call cleanup “campaigns.” Campaigns and shorter-term cleanup milestones were to be listed in appendices to the consent order that were not included with the documents the New Mexico Environment Department published online this week.
When it sued DOE for a do-over of Los Alamos cleanup rules, negotiated by then-Gov. Susanna Martinez (R), the Grisham administration said the 2016 suffered from “a lack of substantive and appropriate clean-up targets for coming years.”
Among other things, the new consent order splits cleanup projects at the lab, which are managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), into a series of five-year and two-year campaigns respectively called Class A and Class B campaigns.
Blown deadlines can result in DOE paying penalties that begin at $5,000 for the first week after the milestone and $10,000 for every subsequent week, according to the consent agreement.
Also under the new consent order DOE may propose updates to cleanup milestones once every government fiscal quarter. The New Mexico Environment Department gets veto power over those proposals, but the consent agreement forces the parties to settle disputes through negotiations that, depending on the issue, can last between 15 and 30 days.
DOE and the state also agreed to review the consent order itself every 10 years “to determine its efficacy and consider whether modifications are warranted,” according to the document.
DOE will also maintain an email address where members of the public may send comments about the consent order, and hold quarterly public meetings about any cleanup done under the consent order. These updates could take place during meetings of the DOE-chartered Northern New Mexico Citizens Advisory Board, among others.
The New Mexico Environment Department and DOE will also co-host annual progress reports about milestones the federal agency meets or fails to meet each year, the agreement says.