Due in part to this year’s Cerro Pelado wildfire, the New Mexico Environment Department has given the cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory until Oct. 30 to perform sampling connected with a hexavalent chromium plume.
The state agency officially granted a two-month extension in an Aug. 24 letter to the DOE Office of Environmental Management and contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B). Without the extra time, the samples from monitoring well R-73 would have been due to New Mexico this week.
State Environment Department Cabinet Secretary James Kenney granted the “force majeure” extension in the letter to DOE’s federal project director Arturo Duran citing both the fire and “unanticipated breakage of lines of pipe.”
The pipe break occurred July 28, a DOE spokesperson said in a Wednesday email. The DOE and its cleanup contractor have used injection wells and monitoring wells as part of interim measures to contain the plume until a lasting solution is implemented.
The well monitoring and sampling milestone is part of a 2016 federal-state consent decree covering legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos.
“Cleanup contractor N3B is preparing to collect the first sample from the lower screen this week and is evaluating work plans to address the unanticipated breakage,” the DOE spokesperson said.
The fire, which started in late April and tied up 1,000 firefighters, came within a couple of miles of Los Alamos lab property, before being fully contained in late June.
