At $189 million, the $4 million requested increase for Los Alamos National Laboratory environmental management operations for fiscal 2017 is smaller than some in the state hoped to see.
Stakeholders for the Department of Energy facility, including Ryan Flynn, New Mexico environment secretary and the nuclear weapons laboratory’s principal state regulator, were hoping for a figure closer to $255 million. The $189 million proposal equals the administration’s request for the current budget, which was reduced to $185 million in the fiscal 2016 appropriation. The cleanup activities covered under the budget request would receive $185.6 million, roughly equally divided between solid waste stabilization and soil and water remediation. The remaining $3.4 million is assigned to miscellaneous programs and community support, including a trustee council and an ongoing natural resources damage assessment; the LANL program that supports independent environmental monitoring in neighboring pueblos; and the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, a stakeholder organization made up of officials from eight cities, counties, and pueblos in the surrounding region.
Going into federal budget rollouts earlier this month, many eyes were on the total request for Los Alamos environmental management operations, as members of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board and the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities hoped to see a substantial step forward from their lobbying efforts with local and national Energy Department officials.
Instead, the modest $4 million raise along with $7.7 million shifted from other cleanup activities will go into remediation and corrective action work needed to continue paying for the consequences of a costly radiation incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant two years ago. The radiation release has been linked to a container that originated at the lab. Largely as a result of that accident, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is in the process of taking over the federal environmental supervision at LANL, but the fiscal 2017 budget request reflects less remediation and disposition of hazardous waste at the lab and more rigorous procedural reforms and compliance improvements.
In a budget justification note explaining major changes, EM said the $11.7 million increase in the LANL legacy waste account would be partly covered by a $6. 2 million reduction in groundwater remediation activities. Funding would be shifted from a high-priority account largely dedicated to stopping an advancing plume of hexavalent chromium in the regional aquifer from reaching the property of the laboratory’s nearest neighbor, the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, a Native American community. Hexavalent chromium, or chromium 6, was made infamous as the contaminant in the movie “Erin Brockovich” with Julia Roberts.
At the Feb. 12 meeting of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales listened to a presentation by Dave Nickless, a project manager from the Environmental Management Los Alamos (EM-LA) Field Office, on developments in a corrective action plan to ensure that issues associated with the WIPP nitrate salt event will never recur. The corrective actions negotiated with the New Mexico Environment Department were based on 24 conclusions and 40 “judgments of needs,” or JONs, resulting in 184 stipulated actions, of which 96 have been completed so far. The plans include, for example, developing a sound technical basis for neutralizing the nitrate salt mixture found responsible for the ruptured container at WIPP, addressing systemic technical issues like process engineering and material conversion, and developing a safety culture that can withstand major failures and blunders.
Gonzales asked when WIPP would be once again able to accept the waste from Los Alamos. The transuranic waste storage site is due to reopen in December, according to DOE.
Nickless said there was a long line of DOE facilities waiting to send waste to WIPP, but that yjr Idaho National Laboratory has the largest inventory in the complex. “They have about 800 shipments ready to go,” he said, LANL is only one of several waste generators, and newly generated waste from the lab averages about 300 to 500 drums a year, he added, which means, “It’s going to take several years” to remove it all.
Gonzales acknowledged a difficult situation. “But by no means do I think it’s acceptable that it’s going to take several years. It is my view that DOE and EM have responsibility to move as quickly as possible to move the waste off the hill.”
There is much to do at LANL to overcome the waste-related setbacks and bottlenecks that are affecting the weapons complex as a whole. Key milestones listed for completion by September 2017 in the budget request justification include meeting the NMED administrative order to isolate the remaining on-site containers with the nitrate salts mixtures blamed for causing the canister to erupt at WIPP; a complete evaluation and recommendations related to the disposition of 33 shafts of remote-handled waste at Area-G, the laboratory’s hazardous waste repository; and complete investigation of hexavalent chromium contamination and the introduction of interim plume control measures, if not a full assault on halting the progress of the plume immediately.
Important disclaimers included in the budget justification identify factors and assumptions that could have significant impact on projects. One raises the possibility that plans for groundwater treatment and remediation “may be implemented for potentially significant durations in several groundwater areas” before the optimum end result can be achieved, “thus possibly adversely impacting the current completion estimates.” Another assumes regulators will “approve the necessary permits without the need for public hearings,” which has become an increasingly vocal public issue in Northern New Mexico.
