Dan Leone
WC Monitor
1/29/2016
A $74 million settlement finalized with the Energy Department last week has cleared the way for New Mexico to overhaul the rules governing the Department of Energy’s nuclear waste cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Legally, the settlement resolves civil penalties the state levied on DOE related to an underground fire and later radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in February 2014, and waste management errors at Los Alamos, the point of origin of an improperly sealed container believed to have caused the incident at the transuranic waste storage site near Carlsbad.
Politically, the settlement allows New Mexico to step away from its standoff with DOE over the accidents, during which the state refused to modify a 2005 consent order that set a deadline for largely completing legacy nuclear waste cleanup at the 73-year-old Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) — a deadline DOE said in 2012 it could not meet, and has since blown.
With the settlement finalized, the New Mexico Environment Department is hard at work on a draft revised consent order that eschews a hard, site-wide cleanup deadline at LANL in favor of a “campaign approach” that divides lab cleanup into phases to be completed one at a time. Currently, DOE and its cleanup contractor, the Los Alamos National Security consortium led by Bechtel and the University of California, spread cleanup labor and resources across the whole site.
In a Tuesday telephone interview, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn told the Weapons Complex Monitor there is no official release date for the draft revised consent order, but that he hopes to get the document out in 2016. “I don’t think it’s going to be a 12-month process at all,” Flynn said. “We’ve got to move.”
Flynn deputy Kathryn Roberts, director of the Environment Department’s Resource Protection Division, on Jan. 27 said the document could be finished in three or four months. Roberts spoke at a Jan. 27 meeting of the DOE-chartered Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board in San Juan, N.M. An environment department spokesperson confirmed Roberts’ remarks, but stressed they did not amount to a formal commitment.
Two years before the WIPP accidents, DOE said it could not clean up LANL by December 2015, as the still-enforceable 2005 consent order requires. Flynn, citing similar missed remediation deadlines across the DOE weapons complex, said setting a new deadline for site-wide cleanup at LANL today would be “setting yourself up for failure.”
Still, there will be some hard deadlines for DOE under the revised consent order, even if the state no longer intends to enforce a federal signoff on full cleanup. Under the revised consent order, individual campaign phases, such as dealing with groundwater contamination near LANL, would come parceled with deadlines tailored to the specific needs of the project, Flynn said.
But before New Mexico sets such end dates, it must first decide which phases of cleanup to prioritize — in other words, which parts of LANL will be treated first, and which parts will wait their turn.
LANL has refined plutonium for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal since the Manhattan Project. Radioactive waste, including contaminated equipment and spent reactor fuel, has been stored on-site for nearly the life of the facility. At Materials Disposal Area G, the largest on-site storage area and the one subject to the December deadline, there was roughly 245,000 cubic feet worth of transuranic waste alone as of 2011, according to DOE. Some of that has since been shipped to WIPP.
There is a human element to the prioritization, Flynn said, insofar as different communities in Los Alamos have different priorities for cleanup, depending on their proximity to various contaminated areas.
But there is also a technical side to the process, Flynn added; figuring out which areas to tackle first depends in part on the difficulty of the cleanup method selected, and for some areas, DOE and New Mexico have yet to select a final remedy.
A spokesman at DOE headquarters in Washington on Thursday declined to comment on the revised consent order, or on the details of the campaign approach Flynn and other New Mexico officials have discussed publicly since 2015.
Under the $74 million settlement, DOE will pay for construction projects designed to make waste handling and transport at LANL and WIPP safer. Most of the money is earmarked for roadwork and water-infrastructure improvements in and around Los Alamos and Carlsbad.
“The department is happy to have resolved the compliance orders so we can focus our full attention on resuming operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” the DOE spokesman stated by email. “The projects being funded through the agreement will enhance our operations at WIPP and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and also are significant investments in the health and safety of people who live near or work at the sites.”
Neither Flynn nor DOE headquarters would speculate on the ultimate cost and schedule for LANL cleanup.
“Anybody that tells you they know how long it will take, or they have a ballpark of how much it will cost, is lying,” Flynn said. “It’s beyond difficult, trying to calculate that. You’re really just guessing.”
In 2008, DOE estimated finishing the bulk of LANL cleanup would take seven years and $1.2 billion. Late last year, Flynn said that estimate was far too low. DOE acknowledged as much and said it was working on an updated estimate, which the agency has not yet released.
An official with Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Santa Fe, questioned whether the campaign approach is anything more than bureaucratic feng shui that gives the impression of change but actually weakens the state’s oversight.
“The campaign approach is OK, but how is it communicated that a [cleanup] item is done?” Scott Kovac, the organization’s operations and research director, wrote in a Thursday email. “That’s a deliverable, just like the current consent order. We are going to insist on concrete milestones and an actual end date.”
On Jan. 21, Nuclear Watch New Mexico gave notice it would sue DOE in federal district court over the blown LANL cleanup deadline. The suit is expected to drop in mid-April.
Meanwhile, the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board community liaison group has its own list of priorities for LANL cleanup, according to official recommendations for the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years posted on the group’s website.
Among the citizen group’s top priorities are:
- Removal of above- and below-ground transuranic waste from the lab. This material would ultimately go to WIPP, which DOE does not plan to reopen until December.
- Removing chromium and perchlorate contamination from groundwater at an around LANL.
- Soil cleanup at LANL.
- Investigating whether any present or former LANL technical areas in the so-called Upper Los Alamos Canyon area some five miles north of the lab are contaminated.
