Settlement will speed up lab waste cleanup
We, the residents of Santa Fe County, the city and the state of New Mexico, are fortunate to have organizations like Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which first filed litigation in 2016 against the U.S. Department of Energy and Triad National Security LLC about violations of the 2005 Consent Order for Los Alamos National Laboratory, issued by the New Mexico Environment Department.
Through the recent settlement agreement with the Department of Energy, Nuclear Watch New Mexico is working to protect the residents of our communities from the dangers of the nuclear, toxic and hazardous waste that has been generated by the lab over nearly 80 years of operations. I am grateful to Nuclear Watch for its leadership, persistence and sustained efforts to protect the public from the dangers the lab creates every day (“Feds agree to LANL waste cleanup and repairs to settle lawsuit,” March 24).
This settlement agreement will help speed up the cleanup at 290 specific containment sites and will begin treating 158 corrugated metal culverts containing cemented radioactive liquid waste buried in Area G, the lab’s largest waste site. It also calls for a feasibility study of comprehensive cleanup at one of the major dump pits at Area G. DOE’s current plan for its cleanup is to “cap and cover” Area G, leaving some 900,000 cubic yards of radioactive and toxic waste permanently buried in unlined pits, which would be a threat to our shared regional groundwater aquifer.
The settlement agreement requires the installation and maintenance of a flow-monitoring station upstream of the Buckman Direct Diversion project, our drinking water system on the Rio Grande, thus providing for the health and safety of our residents. Buckman lost its monitoring station near the Rio Grande during a flood in 2013. In all conversations with the Department of Energy and the lab, replacing the flow monitoring station has been a constant request since 2014. This lawsuit added the necessary pressure to ensure the flow-monitoring station would be replaced to protect our water.
In February, as chair of the Buckman Direct Diversion board, I signed a memorandum of agreement with the DOE environmental management at Los Alamos in which officials there agreed to install a new monitoring station near 109.9 (now called 110.1) at the base of Los Alamos Canyon and the Rio Grande. The agreement lacks the force of law of the settlement agreement. The flow-monitoring station needs to be installed prior to the coming monsoon season, in our view.
Similar to the Nuclear Watch lengthy litigation, resolving the flow-monitoring station replacement has taken nearly nine years. The Nuclear Watch litigation took over six years to resolve.
Both the Department of Energy and lab officials must be more responsive to the local elected officials, nongovernmental organizations, constituents and residents, and through President Joe Biden’s Justice 40 Initiative (Executive Order 14008, Jan. 27, 2021), recognize the environmental injustice lab operations have created for tribal nations and Hispanic communities.