Unhappy with the proposals it has seen to date from the Department of Energy, the New Mexico Environment Department is moving toward dispute resolution to bridge differences over cleanup milestones at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The state is invoking dispute resolution over remediation milestones for 2021 under the parties’ 2016 compliance order on consent. Kevin Pierard, chief of the New Mexico Environment Department’s (NMED) hazardous waste bureau, announced the state decision in an Oct. 1 letter to Arturo Duran, the designated agency manager for the DOE Office of Environmental Management in Los Alamos.
The parties have been discussing potential modifications to milestones for remediating legacy contamination around the 35-square mile Los Alamos federal property for more than a year. The 2016 consent decree overhauled an agreement from 2005 and de-emphasized hard site-wide cleanup deadlines in favor of what DOE calls “campaigns,” which including smaller, more specific remediation projects. Backers of the 2016 deal said such deadlines were often missed anyway, due to funding limits or other factors. But critics said the 2016 rewrite made site-wide cleanup open-ended and deprived the state of a legal lever to motivate DOE to work faster.
During a Sept. 3 meeting, DOE offered a proposal that was “inadequate due to the lack of substantive and appropriate milestones and targets for the upcoming years,” Pierard wrote. “The proposal was noticeably deficient and would further slow clean-up progress which is contrary to protecting public health and the environment.”
During a follow-up meeting on Sept. 23, the Department of Energy officials put forward a proposal that addressed certain state concerns, but is still inadequate, Pierard said in NMED’s declaration that Santa Fe would now move into dispute resolution.
The Department of Energy says it is working to keep a chromium plume within the boundary of the Los Alamos National Laboratory while it works on a permanent solution. Nuclear Watch New Mexico and other advocacy groups said in public comments files in the first quarter of the year they want not only quicker environmental progress, but more enforcement teeth in the consent order.
