There is no indication yet whether the administration of New Mexico’s newly inaugurated Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) might take a fresh look at a state policy, signed days before she took office, on the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.
Before retiring from state service, New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) Secretary Butch Tongate signed off on DOE’s request to alter the way it records the volume of transuranic waste at the underground disposal site, by no longer counting vacant spaces and filler material between container drums as waste.
Tongate, a longtime NMED supervisor who was picked to the lead the agency in 2016 by then-Gov. Susana Martinez (R), retired from state government on Dec. 31, NMED General Counsel Jennifer Hower said by email Friday. No successor has been named. “I have had no conversations with anyone associated with the new administration regarding the recent WIPP permit modification,” Hower wrote.
The new governor was inaugurated Jan. 1, 11 days after Tongate signed an order adopting the recommendations of a state hearings officer that largely approved changes DOE sought to WIPP’s state hazardous waste permit.
The nongovernmental organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which opposed the measure as a major departure from the way waste is counted under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, has said Tongate rushed to get the order out before the new governor took office.
Under the current system, WIPP has emplaced more than 94,000 cubic meters of the allowed total of 176,000 cubic meters of defense-related transuranic waste at WIPP. The new method of calculation, applied retroactively, would reduce that amount to roughly 66,000 cubic meters. The Energy Department said this new measure is more realistic because it counts only waste and should prevent the site’s “premature” retirement.
The permit revision is scheduled to take effect Jan. 20.
