New Mexico officially amended the rules governing legacy nuclear-waste remediation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory late Friday, shifting to a so-called “campaign approach” that focuses on one cleanup project at a time, rather than setting a deadline for site-wide remediation.
New Mexico unveiled the draft revised consent order on March 31.
Remaining LANL cleanup work, DOE estimates, will cost as much as $3.8 billion over 19 years, according to the New Mexico Environment Department press release announcing the new deal. Some $1.7 billion of that will be covered by the new Los Alamos legacy cleanup contract slated to go out to bid later this year for 10 years worth of work starting in 2017. Los Alamos Nuclear Security, the partnership led by Bechtel and the University of California that manages the lab, is the incumbent cleanup contractor.
The new consent order includes both enforceable milestones and unenforceable targets. The essential distinction, according to the document, is that New Mexico may levy financial penalties for blown deadlines, but not blown targets. Financial penalties are: $2,000 a day for the first 30 days after a missed milestone, and $4,000 a day thereafter. New Mexico and DOE must identify between 10 and 20 cleanup milestones for each year covered by the new consent order, the document says. The milestones and targets will be updated yearly. New Mexico may waive any financial penalties it wishes, according to the new consent order.
“The new Consent Order will accelerate the pace of environmental restoration activities in and around Los Alamos,” New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said in the Friday press release. “While the previous version of the Consent Order allowed valuable investigative work to be accomplished, the revised Consent Order will now prioritize cleanup activities.”
New Mexico has said DOE’s $3.8 billion, 19-year cleanup estimate is too low. The agency said in the Friday press release an annual cleanup budget of $255 million “is more appropriate for the site.” Over 19 years, that equates to roughly $4.8 billion, or about a $1 billion more for than DOE thinks is necessary, over the same period of time.
The Albuquerque-based advocacy organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico is suing DOE and Los Alamos National Security in federal court, seeking about $300 million in financial penalties provided for under the terms of the old consent order between DOE and New Mexico. The state on Thursday joined the lawsuit as a defendant.
Under the previous consent order, finalized in 2005, the highly highly contaminated Area G, a 63-acre-plot full of the contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, was supposed to be cleaned up by Dec. 15, 2015.
Much of he waste stored at the roughly 70 year-old Los Alamos National Laboratory is the product of nuclear weapons research and production dating to the Manhattan Project during World War II. The site will generate still more waste as a result of the Pentagon’s nuclear modernization projects, which are now ramping up.
