Dan Leone
WC Monitor
1/22/2016
Nuclear Watch New Mexico said this week it intends to sue the Energy Department and contractor Los Alamos National Security in federal court for blowing a cleanup deadline at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Under a legally binding 2005 consent order between DOE, the New Mexico Environment Department, and federal and state regulators, the Department of Energy was supposed to complete a major and final cleanup of waste left over from Cold War nuclear weapons development at the New Mexico facility by Dec. 6, 2015. As was long anticipated, the date passed without DOE finishing cleaning up the lab’s highly contaminated Material Disposal Area G or requesting an extension of the deadline, as required by the consent order.
That has now prompted Nuclear Watch New Mexico to seek “civil penalties and injunctive relief” in U.S. District Court, under a suit expected to be filed within 60 days, according to a notice of intent posted on the group’s website on Wednesday.
The group’s leader said Nuclear Watch New Mexico decided to sue after the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board on Jan. 15 confirmed DOE plans to expand the lab’s output capacity for plutonium cores for nuclear weapons without first cleaning up sites contaminated by Cold War-era refining.
“The nuclear weaponeers plan to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years completely rebuilding U.S. nuclear forces,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement. “Meanwhile, cleanup at the Los Alamos Lab, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, continues to be delayed, delayed, delayed.”
A DOE spokesman in Los Alamos said “the Department of Energy does not comment on formal threats of litigation.”
New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn, while by no means happy with DOE’s performance at LANL, evidently sees no merit in the planned NukeWatch lawsuit. In a statement issued Wednesday, Flynn called the watchdog group’s claims “baseless.”
While the impending litigation punctuates the matter, DOE has acknowledged since 2012 it would miss its LANL cleanup deadline. The department and the state have also been openly at loggerheads over extending the deadline since 2014.
DOE said in December it was rebaselining its LANL cleanup project, which in 2008 officials believed would cost $1.2 billion and take about seven years. The department has not provided updated cost and schedule estimates, but it is possible the figures will be part of the White House’s fiscal 2017 budget request, which the Office of Management and Budget has said will be delivered to Capitol Hill on Feb. 9.
Meanwhile, DOE and New Mexico have been deadlocked about revising any terms of the 2005 consent agreement since the February 2014 radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad — a leak blamed on safety gaffes by the LANL management and operations contractor, Los Alamos National Security, which DOE found improperly packaged radiologically contaminated material before shipping it to WIPP.
New Mexico has refused to renegotiate the consent order until the agency finalizes terms of its settlement with the statehouse over the WIPP accident and LANL waste management problems. That settlement would include process and safety improvements at both WIPP and LANL.
Whether Los Alamos National Security is still in charge of cleanup at LANL to put those improvements in place is an open question. The consortium – consisting of Bechtel National, BWXT Government Group, the University of California, and URS — runs cleanup operations there under a so-called bridge contract DOE’s Office of Environmental Management awarded in September. The cleanup deal has a one-year base period, worth roughly $160 million, and a pair of six-month, $70-million options that, if exercised, would keep the contractor at the helm through September 2017, at a total potential cost of about $310 million. A new contract is expected to be awarded this year.
The cleanup deal is separate from the consortium’s LANL management and operations contract with DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which covers nuclear stockpile activities. In December, LANS acknowledged that it had not qualified for an additional year on its $2-billion-a-year contract, which was awarded in 2006 and included a seven-year base period plus 10 years of options, when it expires in fiscal 2017.
WIPP, meanwhile, is slated to reopen for reception of transuranic waste by Dec. 31 of this year. In an important step, the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office announced Thursday it had approved WIPP’s new integrated performance measurement baseline, which details the department’s updated cost and schedule plan for reopening the facility.
Exchange Monitor correspondent Roger Snodgrass contributed to this report from Los Alamos.
