State wants to ‘overhaul’ LANL cleanup
The New Mexico Environment Department on Wednesday unveiled a proposed “complete overhaul” of its legal agreement with the federal Department of Energy over how and when to clean up decades of hazardous waste left over from decades of nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
State Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn described the draft plan as a way to move forward and away from the delays and muddled progress experienced under a previous, 11-year-old “consent order” whose missed deadlines for waste cleanup ran out in December. He said the draft agreement with DOE is intended to accelerate waste removal or remediation and help secure more federal dollars for the work.
Flynn said the old consent order from 2005, which ended a court fight between New Mexico and the feds, and was supposed to have required cleanup of the lab’s entire 40-square-mile site by last year, was “focused on the long term” without enforceable near-term goals.
As a result, he said, the work got bogged down and took place in piecemeal fashion. And DOE’s admission about three years ago that it couldn’t meet the deadlines has made obtaining cleanup funding from Congress more difficult. “What I kept hearing was that we needed a clear plan going forward,” Flynn said.
The new proposal calls for a series of discrete “campaigns” aimed at specific cleanup issues or areas, using three-year plans that will be updated annually. Flynn said the focus will be on short-term goals that can actually be met; cleanup over continued investigation of waste sites; and providing ways for the public to review how much progress has been made every year.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said Wednesday he found too many loopholes in the draft agreement. He said it essentially holds cleanup hostage to DOE funding and that, “if DOE finds cleanup impractical” or technically unfeasible, “they can get out of it.”