Cold War nuclear waste will pile up at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to make nuclear-weapon cores there, the New Mexico Environment Department told the agency last month.
In six pages of comments about the plan, the state agency also challenged the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) March finding that the pit mission — which also involves a planned facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina — has no major environmental consequences the federal government has not already contemplated.
Casting pits at Los Alamos and Savannah River will produce transuranic waste that will be buried deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, in southeastern New Mexico. The mine, a series of salt caverns, is DOE’s only deep disposal site for transuranic waste: material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium.
The NNSA’s future pit waste is guaranteed space in WIPP, and a November 2019 settlement between DOE and Idaho prioritized that state’s Cold War-era transuranic waste for shipment to the mine.
Under those circumstances, “DOE will need to store remediated legacy waste at [Los Alamos] and/or delay remediating legacy waste at [Los Alamos] or both,” the New Mexico Environment Department stated in public comments to the NNSA’s draft supplement analysis of the 2008 Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Operations of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In the draft supplement analysis, published in March, the NNSA said it considered making pits at Los Alamos as part of the lengthier 2008 analysis, and that pit-making now planned for the lab would not be much different from what the agency contemplated more than a decade ago.
But the New Mexico Environment Department countered that the NNSA, among other things, “must account for cumulative impact from failing to prioritize legacy contamination clean-up at Los Alamos.”
Before it can close the book on environmental compliance for the pit mission, the NNSA must finalize both the supplement analysis for Los Alamos and an April draft environmental impact statement for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site. The agency has not given an exact timeline for finalizing the documents, but it wants to begin war-reserve pit production at Los Alamos in 2024, and at Savannah River by 2030.
In its comments, the New Mexico Environment Department said it will “take into account DOE’s and NNSA’s compliance history in determining whether to issue permits, permit modifications, establishing permit conditions, etc.”
