The advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico wants New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) to renegotiate a 2016 consent order with the U.S. Department of Energy on cleanup of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
The organization in June urged Grisham to have the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) revisit the deal reached with the federal government during the administration of her predecessor, Susana Martinez (R).
The organization has yet to hear back from Grisham, Scott Kovac, NukeWatch operations and research director, said in a Monday email. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment this week.
“While NMED does not currently have plans to renegotiate the 2016 Compliance Order on Consent, the Department continuously evaluates its enforceable documents for effectiveness and resolves any issues with regulated facilities as necessary,” agency spokeswoman Maddy Hayden said via email Thursday.
The 2016 agreement essentially replaced a 2005 consent order, which included deadlines to remediate LANL environmental problems, especially mixed hazardous waste, and contaminated groundwater.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory has contamination resulting from nuclear weapons activities dating to the Manhattan Project during World War II.
The 2005 deal established 80 specific tasks to be completed by December 2015. It stipulated the Energy Department and its then-lab management contractor, the University of California, must request any extensions through the New Mexico Environment Department.
But NMED did not grant extensions on 13 tasks with missed deadlines. The incomplete tasks include submission of various reports and installation of groundwater monitoring equipment.
The 2016 order junked the prior compliance schedule and replaced it with a new risk-based campaign approach, in which cleanup milestones are prioritized and deadline targets set jointly. The so-called “campaign” would include some voluntary remediation beyond what was set previously. The cleanup tasks would run into the 2030s.
The 2016 consent order superseded the earlier order and suspended prior violations. It seeks to prioritize cleanup milestones and provide more environmental bang for the buck, according to the document. It also seeks to reduce paperwork and the frequency of data collection and reporting where prior results indicate very low or no risk.
NukeWatch challenged the new agreement in court. In July 2018, a federal judge refused to throw out the 2016 order, but sustained the potential financial penalties against DOE and then-lab management contractor Los Alamos National Security for failing to accomplish the 13 tasks identified in the 2005 order. The ruling could conceivably subject DOE to more than $300,000 in fines.
NukeWatch also argues that backing off the earlier consent order, with its enforceable deadlines and penalties, reduced the state’s leverage on the federal budget for Los Alamos.
“We need a fire lit under DOE to pick up the pace of genuine cleanup at the Lab,” NukeWatch said in June. “We need to solve the water contamination problems quickly instead of planning to pump and treat virtually forever.” The deadlines and fines provide the leverage, the groups says.
Over the last decade, funding for the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s nuclear weapons programs has risen 20%. But funding for remediation stayed flat at one-tenth of the almost $2 billion requested for nuclear weapons programs in fiscal 2020, NukeWatch said.
The Donald Trump administration requested $195 million for LANL environmental work in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, while the House of Representatives passed an appropriation bill keeping cleanup money at the fiscal 2019 level of $220 million. The Senate has yet to issue any appropriations legislation for the upcoming federal budget year.
