Making good on a threat from January, a Santa Fe, N.M., nuclear watchdog group on Thursday sued the Energy Department and the agency’s prime contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in federal court for failing to clean up nuclear waste at the 70 year-old weapons lab.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed suit in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico against DOE and Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a conglomerate led by Bechtel and the University of California, alleging 11 violations of the 2005 consent order governing cleanup at Los Alamos.
The suit alleges remediation failures across the lab’s entire footprint, including among others the tiny, 1.25-acre Material Disposal Area A, and the massive, 63-acre Area G site, cleanup of which was a fixture of the consent agreement Nuke Watch, as the group is known, wants enforced.
Nuke Watch asked the court to force DOE and its contractor to comply with the consent order, and levy financial penalties of $37,500 a day for each violation of that document, which stipulated the agency largely finish LANL cleanup by Dec. 6, 2015. At that rate, DOE would already owe more than $400,000, were a judgement against them handed down at press time Friday.
Nuke Watch threatened to file the lawsuit at the beginning of the year, even as DOE and the New Mexico Environment Department announced they would modify the 2005 consent order to allow the government and its contractor to focus on one cleanup area at a time, rather than spreading their efforts across the lab. The waste is the product of nuclear weapons research and production dating to the Manhattan Project during World War II.
New Mexico released a draft of the modified consent order in late March, and Nuke Watch did not like it one bit. The citizens group argued the proposed revisions — which the state hopes to finalize this summer — let the federal government off the hook by failing to set hard dates for site-wide cleanup. Nuke Watch was particularly incensed that the revised order included no firm date for finishing remediation of the highly contaminated Area G.
In the new draft consent order, Area G cleanup will be combined with Area L cleanup. The combined remediation would take about five years, once it starts, according to the document. However, the state proposed no new deadlines or milestones for that campaign. Area G contains radio-contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste. Area L, a small site nearby Area G, contains hazardous liquid wastes.
A DOE spokesperson in Washington did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday. Federal agencies typically do not comment on ongoing litigation.
The draft revised consent order for LANL cleanup remains open to public comment through May 31. The New Mexico Environment Department is scheduled to address public comments on May 18 at a meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Committee at the Cities of Gold Hotel, 10-A Cities of Gold Road, Santa Fe, N.M.
