New cleanup rules for the Los Alamos National Laboratory will go into effect by next week, but the Department of Energy and New Mexico do not have to agree on new cleanup deadlines by then.
DOE and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) must sign a revised consent order governing Los Alamos cleanup within 30 days of the Aug. 30 settlement that ended a three year-old New Mexico lawsuit over the existing consent order.
Counting Aug. 30, the deadline would be Sept. 28, this coming Saturday. Excluding the settlement date, it would be Sunday. It was not clear that the state and federal government would settle on a full list of cleanup campaigns and milestones by that time.
“DOE and NMED are currently in discussions for the Fiscal Year 2025 Appendix B, which will contain Milestones, and Appendix C, which will contain the list of Campaigns,” a DOE spokesperson wrote in a Wednesday email. “[T]he Appendices do not need to be agreed to for the revised 2016 Consent Order to be signed/executed.”
An NMED spokesperson reached by email on Monday did not answer questions about when the milestones and campaign deadlines would become public. A spokesperson for the office of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment over the last two weeks.
Even after DOE and NMED agree on a list of campaigns, defined as five- or two-year cleanup programs, and shorter-term milestones, deadlines could be revised every year during what the consent order calls an “annual planning process.”
For campaigns, DOE must submit proposed changes during the first quarter of the government’s fiscal year, a Dec. 31 deadline. For milestones, proposed revisions are due by the end of July, according to the consent order.
One thing DOE and NMED will not do under the new order is set a lab-wide cleanup date.
The state and the feds “are unable to establish an overall completion date for all Campaigns under this Consent Order at this time,” reads the settlement agreement posted online Sept. 4 by NMED.
