New Mexico officials announced a $16 million fine and other actions against the US Department of Energy for failing to “prioritize” the cleanup and disposal of nuclear and chemical waste left over from research and production of weapons components at the giant World War II-era Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe.
State Environment Secretary James Kenney also ordered on Feb. 11 a review of the disposal permit for the estimated 25,000-acre site for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the underground federal repository for defense-related transuranic waste near Carlsbad, NM, to increase the volume of future waste disposals from Los Alamos.
Between 2021 and 2025, five times more waste was disposed of at Idaho National Laboratory’s WIPP than at Los Alamos, according to the state agency, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
DOE “has not met [state] requirements to clean up legacy waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory and prioritize disposal of that waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” he said. “New Mexicans have stepped up to help solve the nation’s cleanup problem in a way that residents of no other state have.”
The Los Alamos complex, first built in 1943 for the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons mission and now comprised of nearly 900 individual facilities, is still the only site in the United States for the production and testing of plutonium for the US arsenal. Other key missions include advanced research related to national security, materials science, supercomputing, renewable energy and nuclear physics. The Department of Energy estimates that approximately 500,000 cubic meters of legacy waste remains at the site, although more recently Los Alamos is investigating the use of its nuclear waste as a source of tritium, a rare and expensive element now needed for the development of next-generation fusion power.
The state’s civil penalty includes $6 million related to hazardous waste violations and a 2024 consent order directing the Los Alamos site’s management of a groundwater chromium plume that was discovered in 2005 to migrate off-site and on the San Ildefonso Pueblo reservation, the agency said, which also required the DOE to submit for approval a revised plan of interim measures. In addition, the state collected a $9.78 million civil penalty related to groundwater rule violations, which required DOE to develop within 60 days a cleanup and mitigation plan and a revised groundwater discharge permit application.
The state is also challenging DOE’s postponement of the cleanup of “Materials Disposal Area C,” an 11.8-acre unlined landfill containing radioactive waste, heavy metals and hazardous chemicals dating to the 1940s, located above a regional drinking water aquifer.
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The DOE argued in hearings last year that the area is now in “active facility operations,” so it sought to postpone cleanup action. In the Feb. 11 order, the state orders Los Alamos to provide evidence within 30 days to determine next steps.
In an email response to a request for comment from a New Mexico publication, a DOE spokesman said the department is “progressing on the environmental cleanup of the legacy at [Los Alamos] and remains committed to public safety, efficiency and transparency.”
