PHOENIX — The public will get its first look at a new proposed consent agreement governing DOE cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) near Los Alamos, N.M. on March 30, a state official said here at the 2016 Waste Management Conference.
“We’re targeting March 30 for the document to go up for public comment,” Kathryn Roberts, director of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Resource Protection Division, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing here Monday after a panel discussion.
Roberts said the document will be posted on the Environment Department’s website.
DOE and NMED in January finalized a $74 million settlement for civil penalties the state levied on the agency after a pair of accidents at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. in 2014, one of which was linked to nuclear waste that originated at the Los Alamos lab. Afterward,
New Mexico officially began revising the 2005 consent agreement that set cleanup terms at LANL.
DOE long knew it would blow a December 2015 deadline to finish cleaning up LANL’s highly contaminated Area G, but the state refused to revise the terms of the consent order and give DOE a new deadline until it settled up over the WIPP accidents.
Roberts on Monday would not discuss the specifics of the document, which New Mexico already has said will eschew a hard, site-wide cleanup deadline at LANL in favor of a “campaign approach” that divides lab cleanup into phases to be completed one at a time. Currently, DOE and its cleanup contractor, the Los Alamos National Security consortium led by Bechtel and the University of California, spread cleanup labor and resources across the whole site.
