A Wednesday presentation from the top cleanup official at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) indicates DOE believes it will take another 19 years and $2.9 billion to clean up remaining legacy waste at the 70 year-old nuclear weapons lab — billions of dollars less than what the state of New Mexico wants devoted to the project over that time.
Doug Hintze, manager of the Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, unveiled the updated LANL-cleanup life-cycle cost Wednesday in Santa Fe, N.M., at a meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board. The DOE-chartered group includes local stakeholders who advise DOE about cleanup at the lab.
On an annual basis, DOE’s latest estimate for legacy LANL cleanup costs works out to a little more than $150 million, or about $40 million less than what the agency requested for fiscal 2017 for the Environmental Management Los Alamos Office that manages the remediation. New Mexico wants about $255 million a year spent at LANL, which over 19 years equates to roughly $5 billion.
A spokesperson for the New Mexico Environment Department, the state’s regulator for LANL cleanup, reiterated the state’s position that $2.9 billion — a cost estimate that assumes DOE caps and covers all the LANL landfills, rather than removing the waste within and cleaning up the soil — is not enough to get the job done.
In any case, the spokesperson said by email Friday, “per the 2016 Consent Order, any cleanup remedy must be selected through a process that includes a public hearing, and this process would need to be completed before DOE would be in a position to accurately assess the true cost of cleanup at the site.”
Legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos, which assembled the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is slated to be a major cog in the Pentagon’s nuclear modernization program, has been managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management since 1989. Cold War weapons development resulted in mostly solid waste being stored throughout the 40 square-mile site, necessitating, among other things, surface and groundwater cleanup. Could use a bit more detail on what the cleanup involves. FIXED -dl
Through 2015, DOE had spent $3.2 billion on remediation of legacy waste at the lab, a DOE spokesperson wrote. Using the department’s projection, that would put the total cleanup bill through 2035 at more than $6 billion. Does DOE have anything to say about the continuing disagreement with NMED on spending? DIDN’T ASK THEM. -dl
The life cycle Hintze laid out for the Northern New Mexico Citizens Advisory Board also included cost and schedule breakdowns for individual cleanup tasks, including remediation of the highly contaminated Area G transuranic waste processing facility. Area G, which Hintze’s slides say will take 11 years to clean up at a cost of almost $150 million, would be the very last campaign to finish, according to Hintze’s charts.
The slides Hintze briefed to the board also showed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., where LANL’s transuranic waste will go, reopening toward the end of the Energy Department’s 2017 fiscal year, rather than at the beginning. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1; DOE earlier this year said WIPP would reopen Dec. 12.
