Staff Reports
WC Monitor
12/11/2015
Officials at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have known more than two years that the facility would not meet a key deadline in a fence-to-fence cleanup of radioactive and hazardous waste that their predecessors agreed to more than a decade ago under a binding court-ordered consent decree. A settlement for completing the cleanup of legacy waste left over from the first 60 years of nuclear weapons research and production was signed on March 1, 2005, in the Rotunda of the State Capitol by officials of the Department of Energy, the laboratory, and the New Mexico Environment Department. However, the deadline passed well short of goal on Dec. 6.
A statement Thursday from the DOE’s Environmental Management office at LANL said in part, “The cleanup of legacy waste at LANL continues under the existing Consent Order, which does not expire. The Department acknowledged that this Consent Order could not be met in 2012 due to complex challenges.”
The agreed-upon completion date was intended to follow sign-off for one of the most challenging tasks, the cleanup of the largest depository for hazardous materials known as Area G, along with two other nearby, smaller sites. At a public meeting in November, Doug Hintze, the newly installed manager of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management field office in Los Alamos, estimated it would take another six to eight years at a best-guess cost of about $225 million, but that was for the least expensive and easiest of the proposed solutions, known as “cap and cover.” EM presumes the remedy would be an engineered cover for the three disposal areas, requiring long-term surveillance and maintenance and a difficult path to approval. And that is only one piece of the remaining work.
Budgets for the environmental management program at LANL have risen from about $140 million a year in 2005 to $189 million for next year, depending on the outcome of the current federal budget negotiations. A few good years, aided by funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, exceeded $200 million for cleanup. In his recent presentation for the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, Hintze broke the funding envelope into percentages of categories that vary from year to year. These showed about 39 percent of the funds going to cleanup and environmental monitoring and about 61 percent for human capital and pensions, safeguards and security, facility and infrastructure operations, and various commitments and agreements.
New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said at that time that DOE’s current estimate for completing the work, the life-cycle baseline, was $1.2 billion, a figure he said was “far too low.”
EM acknowledged that the projection is out of date. “The previously approved EM lifecycle baseline for LANL legacy cleanup activities was developed in 2008,” the office stated. “An updated lifecycle baseline estimated has been prepared is currently being reviewed.”
A revised consent order has yet to be worked out between the parties involved, which are awaiting the new baseline estimate of costs. They are also awaiting resolution of issues concerning a $73 million penalty that NMED has assessed DOE for damages related to a radiation release on Feb. 14, 2014, that caused the closure of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico.
After the incident at WIPP, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz decided to split the environmental mission away from Los Alamos National Security, the laboratory’s management company, and turn it over to the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to administer, a process that is still in an early stage.
At a meeting of environmental contractors in August, Christine Gelles, who was the first acting manager of the EM office in Los Alamos, gave a frank assessment of some of the factors that contributed to what was to be a missed deadline. “We had a consent order driving a certain pace of deliverables and we never really fully funded the baseline required to comply with that consent order,” she said. That made it more difficult to change schedules and milestones, which was nearly manageable until a wildfire that began on June 2, 2011. The Las Conchas wildfire blackened 150, 000 acres and came within 3.5 miles of highly flammable plutonium waste stored at Area G. After that, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez made it one of the state’s highest priorities to remove the plutonium to WIPP as quickly as possible. “And we had eight out of 10 quarters really successfully, and we had one quarter to go when we had the breached container,” Gelles said. “We made great progress toward that … but look where we are now.”
