The Department of Energy’s Northern New Mexico Site-Specific Advisory Board heard March 19 DOE is facing $16 million in potential civil penalties for multiple violations assessed under a February compliance order from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) that proposes.
The fines were assessed by the state under a Feb. 11 administrative compliance order partly due to what NMED deems inadequate efforts to control the hexavalent chromium plume at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The plume has evidently migrated eastward from Los Alamos toward Pueblo de San Ildefonso land remains shut down following action by NMED on Nov. 18, 2025. The order marked the second time the state halted the system, which had been designed to contain the plume by pumping, treating and reinjecting groundwater to form a hydraulic barrier.
State regulators are requiring DOE to adopt a more aggressive groundwater extraction approach and develop alternatives to the interim measure. Longer-term remedies remain under negotiation. Work to better define the plume continues.
In addition, the state action concerns what NMED concerns DOE foot-dragging in the pace of transporting Los Alamos’ legacy transuranic defense waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.
Both DOE efforts to contain the plume and the pace of the lab’s transuranic waste shipments to WIPP are long-running points of contiontion between DOE and NMED.
The order that accuses DOE of hazardous waste violations in New Mexico also calls for the federal department to rder related to hazardous waste violations that requires the DOE to submit documentation to NMED to support its request to defer the cleanup of an 11-acre landfill containing toxic and radioactive pollution (known as Material Disposal Area C or at Los Alamos.