The Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico reported 25 breaches of its state hazardous waste facility permit during fiscal 2017, according to a recent filing with the New Mexico Environment Department.
The 25 infractions in the budget year ended Sept. 30 are far less than noted in preceding years, when the annual number ran into the triple digits. As recently as fiscal 2015 there were 421 instances of noncompliance with the hazardous waste facility permit.
“Los Alamos National Laboratory continues to focus on program improvements and assisting hazardous waste generators across the Laboratory to improve compliance on a daily basis,” a LANL spokesperson said in a Monday email.
Most of the violations cited in a letter and accompanying Nov. 28 report from DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration and the laboratory concern reporting or recordkeeping. This included four instances in which correspondence was not placed into the LANL public reading room.
The report notes that a project team was placed in charge of reviewing operating records and waste inventory reports and correcting any incorrect data going back to 2015 and 2016.
New Mexico regulates hazardous waste at LANL under the state Hazardous Waste Act. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), state programs can operate in lieu of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Energy Department and its contractor are required to report by Dec. 1 on both releases of hazardous waste or constituents and instances of noncompliance with the permit.
“There were no releases during this timeframe, and none of the instances of noncompliance detailed within this report posed a potential threat to human health or the environment,” according to the annual report.
There were four instances during the past fiscal year, most recently in October, of containers of mixed waste being found without a “hazardous waste” label. “Mixed waste” indicates a combination of radioactive waste and other waste that includes hazardous waste.
Los Alamos was launched in the 1940s to design and build an atomic bomb, and its work over the decades has produced significant amounts of radioactive and other waste. In recent times the lab has made shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., a priority, particularly after a major wildfire got within 4 miles of LANL’s TRU waste storage area in 2011.
A waste container from Los Alamos burst open at WIPP in February 2014, releasing radiation and closing the underground disposal facility for nearly three years.
