State and federal settlement talks about revamping the 2016 consent order for legacy cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will continue into early April, according to a status report filed this month with a federal court.
Representatives from the New Mexico Department of Environment (NMED) and DOE Office of Environmental Management asked for and received a 90-day extension on Jan. 5 from the U.S. District Judge Kenneth Gonzales in New Mexico. The sides held settlement conferences on Nov. 15 and again on Dec. 8, according to the status report filed by the parties. They now have until April 5 to broker a compromise deal.
“They have not reached agreement but they are in the process of scheduling another meeting to continue their discussions,” according to the update that parties filed with the court. “Renegotiation of certain terms of such a complex regulatory document is a time-consuming and technically detailed process that requires the involvement of various personnel from both NMED and DOE,” the parties said in the request.
The state of New Mexico has sued the DOE, seeking to terminate the 2016 consent order on Los Alamos cleanup, which replaced a 2005 version that environmental interests said had firmer deadlines and regulatory teeth. The litigation, originally filed in state court, was removed to federal district court in March 2021.
Although the feds and state were unable to agree on a full-slate of cleanup milestones for fiscal 2021, which ended Sept. 30, Chris Catechis, acting director of NMED’s Resource Protection Division, told an online meeting on Los Alamos remediation last week that the state is still working on such targets while the litigation continues.
Cleanup “is not going as fast as we want to see it,” Catechis said in response to a comment from Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, during the online meeting. “With that said, we don’t want to walk away from the process” altogether, he added. Both Coghlan and Catechis acknowledged the parties cannot discuss the litigation in detail.
Editor’s Note: Article modified on Monday Jan. 17 to correct the next to last paragraph.
