Officials from the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the New Mexico Environment Department are set to meet in July to discuss legacy nuclear-waste-cleanup priorities for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2020, the chair of an agency-funded advisory group said Wednesday.
“The [New Mexico] Environmental Department and Los Alamos [Environmental Management] begin their discussions on the 2020 milestones and budgets some time beginning in July,” Stan Riveles, chair of the DOE-chartered Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, said in Augusta, Ga., during a meeting of EM Advisory Board chairs.
Under a consent order finalized in 2016, the state of New Mexico agreed to let DOE EM clean up Cold War nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) without setting a hard date to finish the work.
The state and the federal agency — which has blown multiple long-term cleanup deadlines at LANL — argued at the time that the consent order’s flexible remediation “campaigns” make it easier to attract funding from Congress by focusing on certain parts of the lab. Under previous consent orders, EM was obliged to clean up the whole facility at once, meaning a snarl with one project might sap funding from another that was clipping along.
The federal and state agencies can also modify the cleanup campaigns year to year, giving DOE a way to press on with a project in one section of the site if unforeseen obstacles arise at another.
“We think the rolling milestones at Los Alamos are working well,” Mark Gilbertson, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, told Riveles on Wednesday.
