The Department of Energy and contractor Los Alamos National Security have until July 19 to respond to a lawsuit from the advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which alleges the federal agency owes the state millions of dollars after it blew a 2015 deadline to clean up a large cache of Cold War-era nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
After filing a response, DOE and its contractor, which operates the lab and is in charge of all cleanup there through September 2017, have until July 28 to meet with the Albuquerque-based organization and at least discuss a settlement, Steven Yarbrough, magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico, wrote in a June 14 order.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed suit May 12, alleging 12 violations of the 2005 consent order governing cleanup at Los Alamos. The suit alleges remediation failures to meet cleanup milestones across the lab’s entire footprint, including the tiny, 1.25-acre Material Disposal Area A, and the massive, 63-acre Area G site, cleanup of which was a fixture of the consent agreement NukeWatch, as the group is known, wants enforced.
NukeWatch asked the court to force DOE and its contractor to comply with the consent order, and levy financial penalties of $37,500 a day for each day that passed after each of the 12 missed milestones. According to a NukeWatch press release, that runs to more than 20 years worth of violations, amounting to about $300 million in penalties.
Neither the group nor DOE would comment on the pending litigation.
Meanwhile, DOE is still waiting for New Mexico to finalize updates to the 2005 consent order that would drastically change the terms of legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos. The state released the draft revised consent order in March, and New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said at that time July 4 would be a “good target” for releasing the final version of the document.
“So far, it [the Consent Order] has not been finalized and I do not know when that might happen,” a spokesperson for the New Mexico Environment Department wrote in a Wednesday email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
