“Essentially blessing what DOE was going to have to do anyway in order to expand nuclear weapons activities and waste disposal,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “And once again demonstrated the subservience of our state government to the nuclear weapons industry here in New Mexico.”
By Scott Wyland [email protected] Santa Fe New Mexican December 6, 2021 santafenewmexican.com
The N.M. 4 and East Jemez Road intersection in the far northwestern corner of Santa Fe County will be improved as part of a $15.5 million upgrade of routes on which Los Alamos National Laboratory transports nuclear waste to an underground disposal site in Southern New Mexico.
The U.S. Energy Department will spend $3.5 million to improve the intersection, which lies just outside Los Alamos County, and another $12 million to upgrade routes it owns and uses mostly to ship transuranic waste — contaminated gloves, clothing, equipment, soil and other items — to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
The project, planned for the spring, is part of a 2016 agreement the federal agency made with the state in lieu of penalties for a ruptured waste container causing extensive radioactive contamination at WIPP two years earlier.
A container packaged in a volatile blend of organic cat litter and nitrate salts burst in an underground chamber in 2014. WIPP was shut down for three years, and the contamination cost $2 billion to clean up.
Lab and nuclear security officials have indicated road improvements will be needed for shipping higher volumes of waste generated when the lab produces plutonium cores — or pits — used to trigger nuclear warheads.
A spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department branch, wrote in an email the upgrades will serve the lab and commuters.
“The planned improvements to the intersection will help facilitate the flow of all traffic that uses this intersection, including vehicles transporting waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory,” agency spokeswoman Kate Hewitt wrote. “As [for] the WIPP transportation route, it allows us to ship transuranic waste from LANL to WIPP and accommodates thousands of commuters each day.”
The work will add lanes and safety features that will enhance the daily traffic flow through the intersection, both going west to the lab and south to White Rock, Hewitt wrote.
The project also will aid the National Park Service in creating a new parking area at Bandelier National Monument’s Tsankawi site east of the intersection, the nuclear agency said in a news release.
A watchdog group criticized the agreement that created the project, saying it allowed the Energy Department to sidestep real penalties.
“Essentially blessing what DOE was going to have to do anyway in order to expand nuclear weapons activities and waste disposal,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “And once again demonstrated the subservience of our state government to the nuclear weapons industry here in New Mexico.”
This settlement was made under former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez.
Martinez sought to relax regulatory oversight as much as possible on the lab, Coghlan said.
Coghlan said the road improvements are a precursor not only to the lab producing pits but also converting as much as 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium into an oxide powder.
The Energy Department issued a notice of intent a year ago to begin work on an environmental impact statement as one of the first steps toward diluting and disposing of the plutonium left from the Cold War.
The notice hints “downblending” the plutonium would be necessary to reduce radioactivity enough for the waste to be accepted at WIPP, which only takes lower-intensity waste.
Opponents’ main concern is the 26 metric tons of cast-off pits that are being kept at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
This plutonium would be sent to the lab, where it would be turned into oxide powder through the lab’s ARIES program, which was created in the early 2000s to help make the substance unusable for nuclear weapons.
The powder would be shipped to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where it would be diluted before returning to New Mexico for disposal at WIPP.
That would mean a more hazardous substance than transuranic waste would be transported twice on N.M. 599 and U.S. 84/285 — when the plutonium comes in from Pantex and when the lab ships the powder.
At an online forum Wednesday, lab Director Thom Mason confirmed the lab is the only place in the country where plutonium can be turned into oxide powder.
Coghlan said the waste-transport routes will get heavier use in the coming years, so it’s no surprise that federal agencies want to improve the roads.
“It’s all related to plutonium pit production and plutonium waste, both coming and going,” he said.