The Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department could bring in a mediator to help negotiate a plan to control a hexavalent chromium plume at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, an advisory panel heard Wednesday.
Managers for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Los Alamos and the New Mexico Environment Department told the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board about their mutual interest in a mediator.
A mediator might help the strained relationship between the feds and the state and was one tack the Government Accountability Office recommended in a July report.
The New Mexico agency formally asked DOE to retain an “independent mediator” about the plume in a Sept. 6 letter to Michael Mikolanis, boss of DOE’s Environmental Management field office for Los Alamos.
Both a traditional mediator and a third party with technical expertise to facilities plume discussions are being considered, Sarah “Ellie” Gilbertson, the DOE cleanup office’s deputy manager told the advisory panel Wednesday. No mediator has been settled upon yet, she said.
Effective April 1, the state ordered DOE to stop injection of treated water within the plume itself, a practice the federal agency thinks has enabled it to bottle up the plume about 500 feet away from the lab’s boundary with land that is the historic home of a federally-recognized American Indian tribe. The New Mexico Environment Department, however, fears the injection strategy might actually be worsening underground contamination.
For some time, DOE “has expressed that treated groundwater can only be disposed of by injecting into existing injection wells, a position with which [the state Environment Department] disagrees,” according to the Sept. 6 letter to DOE.
At a higher level, the state and the feds remain in litigation over the 2016 Compliance Order on Consent, although settlement talks are occurring in the case before the U.S. District Court for New Mexico.
The state Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) sued DOE in 2021 to force renegotiation of the consent order governing legacy clean-up of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
