With the New Mexico Environment Department suing the Department of Energy over a 2016 consent order on legacy waste cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the head of an advocacy group last week questioned why the state is negotiating with the feds over remediation milestones.
The New Mexico Environment Department has filed suit against DOE “as I understand to try and terminate the consent order,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said during an online meeting on cleanup under the settlement agreement. “I can’t see the value really, or NMED really continuing to engage in this process determining milestones that at least in my view are really paper milestones to begin with [such as filing reports].”
Coghlan directed his comments to Chris Catechis, acting director of NMED’s Resource Protection Division after Catechis and other state officials said they have not agreed to a full schedule of cleanup milestones with DOE. The parties mutually agreed upon 13 cleanup milestones but could not agree upon five others, according to federal and state presentations at the meeting.
“Can you justify to me why NMED should even engage in this process,” Coghlan said. “I just don’t get it … Why bake half a loaf? Go all in and sue ‘em and get a new consent order.”
“We agree that we don’t feel the cleanup is not going as fast as we want to see it,” Catechis said. “With that said, we don’t want to walk away from the process” altogether, he added. Both Coghlan and Catechis acknowledged the parties cannot discuss the litigation in detail.
In a court filing last week, NMED wrote that it was still negotiating a settlement with DOE, and that the two agencies needed to continue talking into the spring.
“The parties believe that continued direct negotiation between them is most likely at this stage to enable them to make progress toward a possible settlement of this litigation,” reads the Jan. 5 joint status report in the U.S. District Court. “They would thus like to focus their resources on these efforts. To that end, they ask that the Court extend the stay in this case for 90 days, until April 5, 2022, with another status report due then.”
A list of DOE cleanup accomplishments, such as monitoring and interim measures to mitigate an ongoing chromium plume, was submitted to the state in December.
The DOE has estimated legacy cleanup at Los Alamos will run through 2036, according to an NMED presentation during the meeting.
