The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) is taking enforcement action against the Department of Energy, saying DOE has failed to prioritize legacy nuclear cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In a Wednesday press release, NMED said it was issuing orders to hold DOE “accountable” for foot-dragging in moving old defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste from Los Alamos to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
As a result, NMED is issuing three orders, including financial penalties, against DOE and also initiating a modification to WIPP’s state permit.
The permit modification seeks to impose more explicit standards for WIPP shipments. The document argues the volume of transuranic waste sent to WIPP from Los Alamos has actually slipped in recent years and WIPP is taking in five times as much TRU waste from Idaho National Laboratory than Los Alamos.
DOE is under a federal consent order for moving nuclear waste out of Idaho.
The NMED-backed modification argues that a planned new underground panel that would prioritize legacy waste really won’t start emplacing TRU waste until the early 2030s, near the end of WIPP’s current 10-year hazardous waste permit.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management “is advancing legacy environmental cleanup at LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] and remains committed to public safety, efficiency, and transparency,” a DOE spokesperson told Exchange Monitor by email Thursday evening. “We received Administrative Compliance Orders from the New Mexico Environment Department on February 11, 2026, and are in the process of reviewing them.”
One of the enforcement orders requires the feds to submit paperwork to justify keeping the landfill open at Material Disposal Area C. The order cites both DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and prime contractors. The order says the landfill is a longstanding area of contention. DOE in 2025 elected not to engage in dispute resolution, according to the order.
A second order includes more than $6 million in civil penalties over alleged DOE mismanagement of a chromium plume at Los Alamos. A third order includes more than $9.7 million in proposed civil penalties for groundwater violations connected to the chromium plume.
NMED said DOE has shown a longstanding “lack of urgency” in preparing and shipping transuranic and mixed waste, generated between the 1940s and the 1990s, from Los Alamos to WIPP’s deep underground disposal facility.
WIPP’s legal capacity is set at 6.2 million cubic feet of TRU waste under the federal Land Withdrawal Act. WIPP, which is carved out of an underground salt mine, is nearly half full, NMED said in the press release.
“New Mexicans have stepped up to help solve the nation’s cleanup problem in a way that residents of no other state have,” New Mexico Environment Secretary James Kenney said in the release. “The U.S. Department of Energy must prioritize their health and welfare by expediting cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory and ensuring there’s space for New Mexico’s legacy waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.”
For example, DOE proposes to keep open a roughly 12-acre landfill in Los Alamos holding legacy waste buried in unlined pits, NMED said, adding the landfill is near the regional drinking water aquifer.
The landfill at issue is “within a few hundred yards of the lab’s main facility for plutonium “pit” bomb core production,” Jay Coghlan, the head of the advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico or Nukewatch New Mexico, said in a Wednesday email to Exchange Monitor.
Los Alamos National Laboratory “is prioritizing that production above everything else while cutting cleanup and nonproliferation programs and completely eliminating renewable energy research. DOE’s and NNSA’s unilateral deferment of Area C until it ‘is no longer associated with active facility operations’ in effect means that it will never be cleaned up,” Coghlan said.
DOE and NNSA are increasingly focused on using Los Alamos to help the Pentagon engage in a renewed international arms race, Coghlan said.