The Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department were to hold an online public meeting Thursday evening to discuss cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a 2016 consent agreement between the state and the feds that the state’s governor has lately criticized.
The meeting, run by the DOE Office of Environmental Management and the state environmental agency, was scheduled from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Mountain Time. The link to the meeting via Webex can be found here. The access code is 2632 980 0641 and the meeting password: iKF3mdHMy73. Session audio is also available by phoning (415)-655-0001, and using access code: 2632 980 0641.
The New Mexico Environment Department will host the meeting and representatives from the DOE-Environmental Management field office at Los Alamos will report on work finished in the federal 2021 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30 along with remediation milestones for fiscal 2022.
A link to the milestones and targets for fiscal 2022 is available here.
The New Mexico Environment Department went to court last year seeking to terminate the 2016 consent order on legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos and replace it with what it deems a more aggressive remediation plan with firmer deadlines.
Some citizen groups in the state have dubbed the 2016 consent order, negotiated during the administration of former Gov. Susana Martinez (R), as a watered-down alternative to a prior 2005 federal-state consent order.
Los Alamos has legacy contamination going back to the 1940s, when the lab was created to design nuclear weapons as part of the World War II-era Manhattan Project.
