The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) plans talks this summer with the Department of Energy on potential modifications to a 2016 legal agreement over nuclear cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
The 2016 consent decree revamped a prior 2005 deal between NMED and the federal agency on cleanup of contamination left from Manhattan Project and Cold War-era nuclear weapons programs at the Northern New Mexico site. The state agency has not publicly identified specific changes it wants made to the document.
The latest arrangement reduced use of hard deadlines in favor of remediation campaigns, which include some ancillary remediation.
The revised consent order left the state with a weaker hand to press for expedited cleanup, some citizens’ groups said in comments solicited ahead of the planned state-federal talks.
The New Mexico Environment Department is publishing the public comments it started gathering in January after asking stakeholders to weigh in on progress of remediation of legacy waste at Los Alamos under the 2016 Compliance Order on Consent.
Supporters of the 2016 order said deadlines under the old system were often missed due to funding limits at the Energy Department. They also said the new version allows cleanup crews to perform more ancillary remediation in a given area before having to rush off to a different deadline task.
However, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center said in comments filed Feb. 28 that enforceable deadlines in the 2005 order gave the state agency more leverage in its dealings with DOE.
The Santa Fe nonprofit organization said the original consent order helped NMED push the Energy Department and its cleanup contractor into achieving significant progress between 2005 and 2011. But progress “slowed markedly” in 2011 and 2012 as DOE requested and received 150 deadline extensions from NMED under then-Gov. Susana Martinez (R). The Martinez administration ultimately negotiated the new agreement, which did away with the detailed compliance schedule, according to the law center.
“We will continue to hold the DOE accountable for cleaning up LANL in accordance with existing settlements” and hope to achieve stronger agreements in the future, NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said in a Tuesday press release. Kenney serves under New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D).
