The Los Alamos National Laboratory got whacked with some $300,000 in fines this month for failing to notify the New Mexico state government about eight off-site waste shipments in 2017 and 2018.
The eight shipments, comprising 18 containers, happened while contractor Los Alamos National Security was still in charge of the northern New Mexico nuclear-weapon lab. Among the materials shipped out were mixed low level, solid, hazardous, and halogenated liquid wastes.
Triad National Security, led by the Battelle Memorial Institute, the University of California, and Texas A&M University, has managed Los Alamos since Nov. 1, 2018, and is on the hook for the fine.
The company blamed the lack of notification to the New Mexico Environment Department, required by the state’s Hazardous Waste Act, on an “administrative error,” a spokesperson for the nonprofit team told the local Los Alamos Reporter last week.
The spokesperson said the lab reported the error itself to the New Mexico Environment Department. The department received many of those notifications in 2018 and 2019, each the better part of a year late, according to a June 5 notice of penalty sent to Triad.
Although the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management assumed responsibility for legacy nuclear-waste cleanup at Los Alamos in 2018, hiring a separate contractor to handle that work, the lab prime is still responsible for some of the nuclear waste at the facility. That includes waste associated with producting plutonium nuclear-warhead cores at the Plutonium Facility.
The Energy Department stripped legacy waste cleanup from the Los Alamos prime contract after an improperly packaged waste barrel from Los Alamos exploded underground in February 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant further south in New Mexico. The underground transuranic-waste disposal facility was closed for nearly three years.
Most of Los Alamos’ nuclear waste is at Technical Area 54, in the central-eastern part of the site.
