The public will have its chance Thursday at the Los Alamos City Council chambers to question New Mexico officials about changes the state has proposed to the federally run nuclear-waste cleanup program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the state Environment Department announced late Wednesday.
The Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste Bureau has scheduled the open house beginning at 5 p.m. local time, the state’s press release said. The meeting centers on a draft revised consent order New Mexico unveiled in March, which would change the Los Alamos cleanup strategy agreed to in 2005 to focus on individual cleanup parcels, rather than spreading cleanup efforts across the entire site.
The original agreement signed between DOE, New Mexico, and the University of California — which for years ran Los Alamos before partnering with Bechtel National and other contractors to form the current Los Alamos National Security prime — called for DOE to finish cleaning up LANL’s highly contaminated Area G by 2014.
DOE for years it would miss that deadline, but the state refused to revise the terms of the consent order and give DOE a new deadline until the agency settled up over a pair of accidents in 2014 at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., a storage facility for radio-contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
The state only revealed its proposed changes after DOE in January agreed to pay $74 million to settle civil penalties the state levied after the accidents: an underground fire, and a radiation release blamed on an improperly packaged waste barrel that originated from Los Alamos.
The public comment period on the new consent order runs through May 16, after which the state can finalize the agreement.
