Nuclear waste will pile up at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to make nuclear-weapon cores there, according to the New Mexico Environment Department.
In six pages of comments filed last month about the plan, the state agency also challenged the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) March finding that the pit mission — which also involves a planned facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina — has no major environmental consequences the federal government has not already contemplated.
Casting pits at Los Alamos and Savannah River will produce transuranic waste that will be buried deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, in southeastern New Mexico. The mine, a series of salt caverns, is DOE’s only deep disposal site for transuranic waste: material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium.
The NNSA’s future pit waste is guaranteed space in WIPP, and a November 2019 settlement between DOE and Idaho prioritized that state’s Cold War-era transuranic waste for shipment to the mine.
Under those circumstances, “DOE will need to store remediated legacy waste at [Los Alamos] and/or delay remediating legacy waste at [Los Alamos] or both,” the New Mexico Environment Department stated in public comments to the NNSA’s draft supplement analysis of the 2008 Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Operations of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management handles cleanup of Manhattan Project and Cold War waste at Los Alamos through a 2017 contract with N3B Los Alamos, a team of Newport News Nuclear and BWX Technologies, worth up to $1.4 billion over a decade. Much of Los Alamos’ legacy waste is transuranic waste — material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium — located at the lab’s Area G, within Technical Area 54. The New Mexico Environment Department regulates the cleanup under a consent order signed with DOE in 2016.
In the draft supplement analysis, published in March, the NNSA said it considered manufacturing pits at Los Alamos as part of the lengthier 2008 analysis, and that pit-making now planned for the lab would not be much different from what the agency contemplated more than a decade ago.
But the New Mexico Environment Department countered that the NNSA, among other things, “must account for cumulative impact from failing to prioritize legacy contamination clean-up at Los Alamos.”
Before it can close the book on environmental compliance for the pit mission, the NNSA must finalize both the supplement analysis for Los Alamos and an April draft environmental impact statement for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site. The agency has not given an exact timeline for finalizing the documents, but it wants to begin war-reserve pit production at Los Alamos in 2024, and at Savannah River by 2030.
In its comments, the New Mexico Environment Department said it will “take into account DOE’s and NNSA’s compliance history in determining whether to issue permits, permit modifications, establishing permit conditions, etc.”
The Energy Department needs New Mexico to modify its WIPP permit in order to continue operating the facility into the 2050s. As written, the permit requires DOE to stop burying waste at WIPP in 2024, then spend a decade safely closing down the site.
At Los Alamos, the NNSA will expand the Plutonium Facility (PF-4 ) to crank out 10 pits a year in 2024, 20 pits a year in 2025 and 30 pits a year starting in 2026. The planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in the site’s F-Area. This would be the larger of the two plants, notionally to produce 50 war-reserve pits annually starting in 2030. Each plant would individually be able to make 80 pits a year, the NNSA has said.
Making 80 pits a year, using a combination of PF-4 and a planned pit-plant at the Savannah River Site, will produce some 1,765 cubic yards (or about 1,350 cubic meters) of transuranic waste annually, according to the NNSA’s latest environmental analyses about the pit program. Tuesday was the last day for members of the public to comment on the Savannah River Site draft environmental impact statement.
In separate comments about the proposed Savannah River pit plant, New Mexico warned that DOE and NNSA should take a closer look at the effect of increased transuranic waste shipments, and disclose more details about the amount of space that waste would take up in the underground at WIPP.
