Staff Reports
WC Monitor
1/8/2016
The Department of Energy is moving to begin containing and cleaning up a growing plume of hexavalent chromium in the regional aquifer under the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After nine years of slow but incremental attention to a complex hydrological puzzle, DOE Environmental Management officials drew up a draft environmental analysis for review and public participation that included a comment period beginning on Sept. 23, 2015, and ending on Nov. 15. A finding of no significant impact, authorizing the work under the National Environmental Protection Act, was signed Dec. 16 by Douglas E. Hintze, manager of the Los Alamos EM Field Office.
Hintze said the project will be tackled in two phases; its cost is estimated at roughly $200 million over three to five years to address a 40-year-old accumulation of a chromium-based contaminant that originated with power plant cleaning operations near the lab’s administrative center that was flushed into a nearby canyon and over time made its way through 700 feet of rock into the aquifer. The first phase of the treatment will include the installation of new wells and operations to gather the data needed to define a final remedy, which would include additional installations, beginning operations, and a long-term monitoring process.
The problem has become more urgent, according to Christine Gelles, who was the acting EM field manager during the first phase of an administrative transition in which EM took over the main environmental responsibilities at LANL, because of its proximity to the neighboring Pueblo de San Ildefonso. “We think this plume has reached the site boundary and could be off in the San Ildefonso sacred area, so we’re working as fast as we can,” Gelles said.
The groundwater that lies beneath the Pajarito Plateau of the Jemez Mountains, where the laboratory is perched, is part of an aquifer that extends over 2,300 square miles and provides water for Los Alamos County as well as the neighboring communities that include Santa Fe and Española. In a region that is either in a drought or threatened with a drought most of the time, all water issues are highly controversial. This one, adjoining and underlying the Rio Grande, the region’s most important source of water, has been even more so, because of its potential impacts on the neighboring lands and people.
