Federal and New Mexico officials have scheduled a public meeting on Jan. 16 to discuss planning issues connected with a 2016 settlement agreement to revamp the approach to legacy cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The New Mexico Environment Department will host the meeting, and DOE’s Environmental Management (EM) Los Alamos Field Office will report on cleanup progress at the lab during fiscal 2017 and the goals for fiscal 2018, which began on Oct. 1.
DOE EM is charged with cleaning up contamination and waste at LANL that was spawned by decades of nuclear weapons development and government-backed nuclear research.
Many of the milestones the agency plans to reach by the end of September 2018 involve publication of various reports that will address the success of interim measures being taken to control an underground chromium plume that originated with power plant cleaning operations near the lab’s administrative center. Among other things, DOE will update the state on the installation of extraction wells and piping.
The lab is engaged in a multiyear effort to remedy the decades-old chromium accumulation. The documents include technical reports detailing results of water, geology, and geochemistry studies that will help with analysis of remediation options, according to DOE material.
The consent order (CO) between DOE and New Mexico’s Environment Department governs the cleanup through a “campaign‐based approach,” the state agency said in a Monday news release. The 2016 consent order represented a major revision of a predecessor document from 2005.
The 2016 version puts less emphasis on hard deadlines and instead focuses on 17 campaigns of related cleanup work. The agreement mandates an annual planning review for considering updates to the cleanup plan.
Availability of government cleanup money, changing conditions, and actual work progress are all issues that can trigger a change in plans, NMED said.
The meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m. local time at the Los Alamos County Council Chambers, 1000 Central Ave. in Los Alamos. For more information about the event, contact Neelam Dhawan at [email protected].
