By John Stang
The state of New Mexico has lately been noncommittal about when it might approve a pair of permits the Los Alamos National Laboratory needs to vent tritium gas into the atmosphere.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the venting, but a spokesperson for the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) said Friday that the state had not yet, and that it had no timeline for doing so.
“NMED is still carefully considering the request and reviewing the multitude of public comments we received on the matter,” the department spokesperson wrote.
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) needs two permits to proceed with the one-time release, Stephanie Stringer, director of the agency’s resource protection division said during a webcast late last week.
If the state permits are issued, LANL will have 180 days to vent the gas, Stringer said.
The waste is stored in four 50-gallon containers in LANL’s Building 1028 inside the site’s Technical Area 54. The tritium gases in the continuers have partially broken down into a combustible combination of hydrogen and oxygen. The National Nuclear Security Administration wants to vent the radioactive gases out of the containers into the atmosphere before moving the four containers to elsewhere.
The agency had not told NMED exactly where the federal agency might move the containers post-venting, Stringer told a virtual audience of about 90 people during a quarterly NMED meeting with LANL stakeholders.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of the anti-nuclear Nuclear Watch New Mexico group, last week repeated his opposition to moving the containers.
“When they are not moving, they don’t have explosive potential,” Coghlan said. “So don’t move them.”
Charles de Saillan, an attorney who works with the environmental advocacy group Conservation Voters New Mexico, suggested that the gases be vented into another container, rather into the atmosphere as planned.
LANL has estimated that off-site does from venting containers might range from fewer than 6 millirem per year to as many as 20.2 millirem a year. The high-end figure is a worst-case scenario that the NNSA calculated to show what would happen if the entire “tritium contents” of the containers was released into the open air in one shot, without the use of air filters. The lower end of the range takes into account “emission control systems and more realistic release scenarios,” LANL says.
Springer said Thursday that venting would be stopped if more than 8 millirem of radioactivity is released from the containers.
Also Thursday, the public was invited to provide feedback on a proposed LANL sampling-and-analysis plan on slightly radioactive debris found in a proposed sewer lift station on former LANL land that could have been contaminated since World War II. NMED must approve this plan before it goes into effect.
Since February, several clumps of radioactive debris have been found in the site that was supposed to hold a sewer system for two low-income and senior-living complexes on former LANL land transferred to Los Alamos County. The site has been fenced off. The Department of Energy and NMED are also monitoring the air quality at the site.
So far, the radiation from the site has not exceeded the background level for that area, Stringer said.
