Bill with cleanup funds for LANL, Cannon and Holloman bases heads to president

• By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
• December 16, 2021

One longtime critic of the lab’s nuclear spending said the total costs for ramping up pit production have ballooned from the original $3 billion estimate in 2017.

“LANL lowballed this to get the work,” said Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group, who said he thinks the cost could go as high as $18 billion.

“They are on a collision course with fiscal reality.”

Meanwhile, the increase in funding to clean up the lab’s legacy waste generated before 1999, including during the Cold War and Manhattan Project, would help speed remediation that is now loosely scheduled to be finished in the mid-2030s.

Last year, state regulators sued the Department of Energy, claiming the agency failed to adequately clean up the legacy waste.

The lawsuit also is aimed at dissolving a 2016 cleanup agreement between the state and Energy Department — known as a consent order — saying it weakened the original 2005 order by eliminating real deadlines and imposing few penalties for slow or deficient work.

“We are supportive of [the] congressional delegation’s focus on cleaning up legacy waste in New Mexico,” state Environment Secretary James Kenney wrote in an email.

At the same time, Kenney wrote that he appreciated delegates’ efforts to hold the military accountable for PFAS pollution in New Mexico.

PFAS is an abbreviation for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Dubbed “forever chemicals” because they take thousands of years to decompose and last indefinitely in the bloodstream, PFAS can cause increased cholesterol, reproductive problems and cancer.

Cannon and Holloman are among the military bases that used a firefighting foam that contained PFAS; they polluted groundwater in Clovis and Alamogordo, respectively.

PFAS pollution near Clovis has contaminated at least one dairy farm.

Groundwater samples indicated chemical levels in that area were hundreds of times higher than the federal health advisory limit.

Making the $175 million in federal money available to fund cleanup might help resolve ongoing legal tussles between the state and military.

The state sued the Air Force in 2019, saying the federal government has a responsibility to clean up plumes of toxic chemicals left behind by the military.

“The United States Air Force must allocate the necessary funding to remediate PFAS contamination … at both Cannon and Holloman Air Force bases,” Kenney wrote.