The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has scheduled a Jan. 9 public meeting to discuss a consent order signed with the U.S. Energy Department in 2016 that updated remediation plans for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. MT at the University of New Mexico-Los Alamos campus on University Drive, NMED said in a Dec. 23 press release. This session on environmental monitoring and oversight at LANL is one in a series of quarterly meetings organized by the state agency.
“The Los Alamos community asked for this discussion on the Los Alamos Laboratory Consent Order and we listened,” NMED Secretary James Kenney said in the release.
The 2016 consent decree revamped a prior 2005 agreement between DOE and the state. It reduced emphasis on hard cleanup deadlines in favor of remediation “campaigns,” which include some ancillary remediation. The prior system’s hard deadlines were frequently missed anyway due to funding limits, supporters of the updated agreement say. Various public interest groups and some elected officials in New Mexico criticized the new order as too weak.
The New Mexico Environment Department in fiscal 2019 cited both Los Alamos lab operator Triad National Security and legacy cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) for violation of state permit regulations, For example,Triad in September incorrectly listed about 250 waste drums as still being at LANL after they had been shipped to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
