Court papers filed Friday show Nuclear Watch New Mexico will amend its lawsuit over nuclear waste cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Spokespersons for NukeWatch, as the group is known, declined to comment about their amended complaint, but confirmed they will file it Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico.
The existence of the amended complaint was disclosed in a Thursday filing by the defendants: DOE, LANL prime contractor Los Alamos National Security, and the state of New Mexico, which joined the lawsuit on DOE’s side in June. The filing requested more time to reply to NukeWatch’s complaint; a federal judge had previously ordered the defendants to reply by Tuesday.
The lawsuit hinges on alleged violations of a 2005 consent order that, by all accounts, is now longer in place. DOE and the state on June 24 agreed on a revised consent order that eliminated substantially all of the cleanup deadlines over which NukeWatch sued on May 12.
When NukeWatch filed suit, the group alleged 12 violations of the 2005 consent order — which at that point was still in effect — governing cleanup at Los Alamos. The suit alleges failures to meet cleanup milestones across the lab’s entire footprint, from the 1.25-acre Material Disposal Area A to the 63-acre Area G site, cleanup of which was a fixture of the consent agreement NukeWatch wants enforced.
NukeWatch asked the court to force DOE and its contractor to comply with the consent order, and levy financial penalties of $37,500 daily for each day that passed after each of the 12 missed milestones. According to a NukeWatch press release, that runs to more than 20 years worth of violations, amounting to about $300 million in penalties.
