The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has not been aggressive enough in cleaning up a hexavalent chromium plume within the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the head of the New Mexico Environment Department said last week.
DOE and its contractors “have denied New Mexicans and tribal members timely and effective clean-up of hexavalent chromium for too long,” James Kenney, the state environment secretary, said June 6. “Clean-up delayed is clean-up denied,” Kenney said.
Kenney submitted comments on behalf of the state to DOE as part of a federal environmental assessment proposed for “Chromium Plume Control Interim Measure and Plume-Center Characterization” at Los Alamos. The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) objected to DOE’s “injection of treated water within the plume itself,” a state agency spokesperson said in a Wednesday email.
The state fears this strategy, rather than containing the contamination, might actually nudge it off Los Alamos property and into neighboring tribal lands or too close to water supplies, the state spokesperson said.
The public comment period on the assessment of DOE’s efforts to keep the plume from spreading to adjacent lands ended June 6, but the public can review the draft environmental assessment this fall, a DOE spokesperson said in reply in an Exchange Monitor inquiry Monday.
NMED under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) sued DOE over Los Alamos legacy cleanup in February 2021, seeking to terminate a 2016 Consent Order agreed on by DOE and then-New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) and replace it with terms that speed remediation, Kenney said.
The parties have reported to the judge they are making progress toward settlement. The parties are supposed to report back to the court July 11.
That 2016 Consent Order remains the “principal regulatory document governing legacy cleanup” at Los Alamos, said the DOE spokesperson. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management must still submit a “final remedial solution” for the chromium plume, the spokesperson said.
“Further, NMED has directed DOE to increase monitoring wells in prior years, but LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] rejected that direction and delayed clean-up,” Kenney said in his comments to DOE last week. “This lack of additional monitoring prevents DOE from producing scientific data that would confirm the effectiveness of this interim measure.”
Effective April 1, the state had DOE temporarily suspend the use of injection wells that inserted clean groundwater underground. These injections, an interim measure to bide time for creating a permanent solution to the plume problem, help create a hydraulic barrier to curb the spread of the plume, DOE said. Injections are suspended while DOE and the state study operational alternatives, the DOE spokesperson said.
The state regulator instructed DOE to suspend the injections, fearing further injections could force the contaminated groundwater to move.
DOE has said its efforts have contained the plume about 500 feet away from the laboratory’s boundary with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso, which is the historic home of a federally-recognized American Indian tribe, according to DOE.
“NMED is concerned about threats to public health and the environment from the plume being pushed towards and onto San Ildefonso, instead of being mitigated by DOE’s injection strategy,” the state spokesperson said.
The plume was created by chemicals used to clean corrosion from cooling towers at a Los Alamos power plant between 1956 and 1972, causing chromium-contaminated water to be released into the Sandia Canyon, according to DOE’s cleanup contractor for the lab.
