Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/13/2015
The New Mexico Environment Department this week warned that it plans to levy additional penalties of more than $100 million against the Department of Energy due to violations at Los Alamos National Laboratory if DOE does not accept accountability for past violations and work with the state on recent compliance orders. The new penalties would come on top of the $54 million in compliance orders NMED issued in December, citing violations at LANL and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that were linked to last year’s radiological release at WIPP. “The ball is entirely in the Department of Energy’s court right now,” NMED Secretary Ryan Flynn told WC Monitor this week. “We’ve structured the compliance orders in a manner to give DOE an opportunity to take accountability for the events that occurred and to step up and work with us on a constructive path forward in order to resolve all of the issues that caused this release.”
The total for the subsequent penalties exceeds $100 million, and currently “$104 million of that compliance order is based on solely on violations for which there is no dispute of fact,” Flynn said. Those fines are not related to a consent order the state has for LANL cleanup, which could trigger additional penalties later this year.
NMED and DOE officials met this week to discuss the compliance orders. Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Mark Whitney emphasized that DOE has taken accountability for some of the violations. “We have in many ways been self-reporting those incidents. There were Accident Investigation Board Reports. We have acknowledged the mistakes that we made,” he said this week at a House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus Briefing. “As far as the discussions with the state of New Mexico related to the administrative order on compliance, we’re having those discussions and that’s ongoing so I won’t comment on that. But that relationship is valuable to us for many reasons, Los Alamos, WIPP, Sandia, and we want to be sure we continue that relationship despite the difficult times.”
Prior to meetings with DOE early this week, Flynn said that the issue was at a “critical juncture.” He added, “We will know within the next few days how this is going to go. … I am not optimistic at this point that any sort of settlement agreement will be reached given DOE’s conduct thus far.”
Flynn: DOE Defenses ‘Ridiculous’
In December, NMED levied a $17.7 million fine for 13 violations at WIPP and a $36.6 million fine for 24 violations at Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, in a response filed last month, DOE called the penalties “grossly disproportionate” and denied many of the alleged violations. Flynn rejected DOE’s claims. “We are fully prepared to go litigate these issues as well as the additional compliance orders. We believe very strongly we will prevail. DOE, the defenses they asserted are ridiculous,” he said. “When we go to a hearing, we will have a couple of key exhibits in those hearings and they will all be DOE’s own investigations that we will be using against them. They don’t have a strong legal leg to stand on when it comes to challenging these and if they think that just stalling or delaying is a tactic that is somehow going to work then they are wrong, because we absolutely intend.”
New Mexico has always been willing to negotiate with DOE, Flynn said, citing negotiations on a consent order that governed the cleanup of Los Alamos and other extensions granted. “I’ve given them extension after extension over the past four years. We’ve tried to work with them each and every time we do an extension. We sit down with them and try to find out what the problems were and work with them to resolve them,” Flynn said. “What we want is for them to be fully compliant. … We’ve never taken a position just to be overly punitive. When they caused a radioactive release at WIPP, they shut down the entire[transuranic] waste program around the country, they put the citizens of New Mexico at risk.”
