The head of the New Mexico Environment Department, James Kenney, supports a congressional committee’s call for the Government Accountability Office to examine practices at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office.
Kenney wrote this week to the U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads the Government Accountability Office (GAO), backing a request this month by the U.S. House and Commerce Committee seeking a review of DOE roughly $7-billion-a-year Office of Environmental Management (EM), and the office’s efforts to curb DOE’s environmental liability of about $500 million.
“The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) strongly supports such a review and would like to directly share our experiences regarding DOE EM with GAO staff regarding delays in legacy waste clean-up at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the lack of transparency related to the prioritization of shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP),” Kenney said in his Wednesday Dec. 22 letter to Dodaro.
While WIPP near Carlsbad, N.M., is the only transuranic waste disposal site in the United States, EM does not grant the laboratory in Los Alamos County, N.M., any home-state preference when it comes to shipments, Kenney suggests. The DOE cleanup office has been signing legally binding settlement agreements with states, such as Idaho, giving them priority over New Mexico in the shipment queue.
“This is problematic for both the clean-up of legacy waste at LANL and new waste from pit production at LANL,” Kenney said.
The House Committee requested a GAO review into the Office of Environmental Management in a Dec. 2 letter signed by Chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J), the GOP’s Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and four other members of the panel. The House panel is concerned about the lack of progress trimming DOE’s $512-billion in environmental liabilities.
Prior assessments by GAO had put EM share of this liability at roughly 80% or $406-billion.
