The New Mexico Environment Department rejected U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concerns about proposed changes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) hazardous waste permit, including a warning that the overhaul could jeopardize the state’s authority to run its federally accredited program.
In an Aug. 11 response to EPA Region 6 Administrator Scott Mason, NMED defended its proposal to prioritize legacy waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) at the Department of Energy’s WIPP repository near Carlsbad. The department also challenged EPA’s assertion that the proposed permit conditions could impede transuranic waste shipments from other DOE sites, violate federal law or raise constitutional concerns.
In a June 22 letter, EPA warned New Mexico that too much permit tinkering could cause the state to lose its authorization to administer the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) program.The feds also said the state’s proposed changes could affect shipment flows to WIPP from Idaho National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and eventually the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Under the state’s proposed conditions, Los Alamos legacy waste would account for at least 55% of waste emplaced at WIPP from 2027 through 2031 and at least 75% beginning in 2032 until the LANL legacy inventory is exhausted. The proposal also calls for LANL’s above-ground legacy waste at Material Disposal Area G to be shipped and emplaced by July 1, 2028.
If WIPP fails to meet the quota requirements, shipments from all other generator and storage sites would halt until the shortfall is corrected.
EPA also said LANL typically accounts for a minority of waste received and disposed at WIPP under the proposal’s rolling-average calculation, and that neither DOE nor NMED had established that LANL could prepare and ship enough legacy waste to meet the targets while sustaining shipments from other sites at historic or anticipated levels.
NMED said quotas are justified by information that emerged after the state’s 2023 WIPP permit renewal, including a delay of Panel 12’s availability for legacy waste until 2035. The department said the delay increases risks from waste stored at LANL and makes quotas necessary to enforce DOE’s previous commitments.
NMED called the EPA threat to take over the RCRA program an overreach, arguing other things, EPA lacks the resources to directly administer the state’s hazardous waste permitting program.
“EPA’s threat to take over New Mexico’s hazardous waste program is both unprecedented and impractical. New Mexico remains in compliance with RCRA, and threatening to strip the state of its authority over legitimate cleanup priorities undermines the cooperative federalism EPA itself claims to support,” said New Mexico Environment Secretary James Kenney.
NMED and DOE are continuing negotiations over language intended to reduce risks at LANL while addressing concerns about the permit conditions. Stakeholder mediation was held July 30 and was scheduled to continue Aug. 13.