In a major decision whose consequences are still being assessed, a federal judge declared that plutonium pit production — one ingredient in the U.S. government’s $1.5 trillion nuclear weapons expansion — has to be performed in accordance with the nation’s strongest environmental law
“…The court found that the agencies charged with reviving the nuclear weapons complex have not properly evaluated the perils that could come with turning out plutonium pits at two different sites, thousands of miles apart. For the plaintiffs in this case — which include Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition — Lewis’s decision to intervene is a milestone.”
“We’ve had a pretty significant victory here on the environmental front,” said Tom Clements, the director of Savannah River Site Watch. “Nonprofit public interest groups are able to hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable.”
Over the past twenty-plus years, there have been four attempts by NNSA to expand pit production through the NEPA process. All failed. According to Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, this string of defeats could have led to the NNSA’s circumvention of the NEPA process during this round of planning for pit production. Adhering to the rules of the NEPA process, he added, “benefits both the public and the government.”
Most Americans don’t seem aware of it, but the United States is plunging into a new nuclear arms race. At the same time that China is ramping up its arsenal of nuclear weapons, Russia has become increasingly bellicose. After a long period of relative dormancy, the U.S. has embarked on its own monumental project to modernize everything in its arsenal — from bomb triggers to warheads to missile systems — at a cost, altogether, of at least $1.5 trillion.
Los Alamos National Laboratory plays a vital role as one of two sites set to manufacture plutonium “pits,” the main explosive element in every thermonuclear warhead. But as a recent court ruling makes clear, the rush to revive weapons production has pushed environmental considerations — from nuclear waste and increases in vehicular traffic to contamination of local waterways, air and vegetation — to the wayside.
The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up.
“We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
Mr. Hennigan says, almost in passing, that “nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries.”
There is a lot to unpack in these six words. There certainly are situations in which one country’s nuclear weapons do deter its adversaries. Russia’s threats to use its nuclear weapons have clearly deterred the United States and NATO from doing more to support Ukraine.
But does deterrence guarantee that these weapons will not be used? Because a failure of deterrence will cause a catastrophe beyond reckoning.
A nuclear war between the United States and Russia could kill hundreds of millions of people in the first afternoon, and the ensuing climate disruption and famine could kill three-quarters of humanity over the next two years. Is there any conceivable benefit that can be derived from possessing these weapons that is worth running this terrible risk?
There have been many near misses already during the nuclear weapons era, crises where certain countries actually began preparations to launch nuclear weapons.
As former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pointed out, we have not survived this far into the nuclear era because we knew what we were doing. Rather, as McNamara put it, “It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
The idea that deterrence makes us safe is a dangerous myth. As our highest national security priority, we should be actively seeking a world without nuclear weapons. We don’t know if such an effort can succeed; we have never tried. We do know what will happen if deterrence fails.
Ira Helfand
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is a former president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Coinciding with NNSA’s announcement of the first diamond-stamped pit, a US District Court ruled that the Energy Department and the NNSA violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to properly consider alternatives before proceeding with pit production, requiring the agency to conduct a programmatic environmental impact assessment.
This was a victory for transparency and the community groups—among them, Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition—who, for years, have been asking for such an assessment.
Two conflicting developments arose this month in US efforts to produce new plutonium pits for its nuclear weapons: The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced it had produced a warhead-ready pit—the explosive core of a nuclear weapon—for the first time in decades, and a federal court ruled that NNSA will be required to consider the cumulative environmental and health impacts of its pit production program.
Overshadowing these events is a vigorous debate over the necessity for new pits at all. Previous analyses have found that plutonium pits have viable lifespans well beyond the expected service life of the current stockpile, whereas production of pits for new weapons is part of a sweeping US nuclear modernization that raises concern over the future of arms control and any possibility for stockpile reductions at a time of deteriorating international relations. Continue reading→
Both sides of the case are ordered to present a joint plan to address violations by Oct. 25
One of the plaintiffs, Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico called that a “pretty large hurdle to overcome,” for both parties. It’s unclear what happens if the parties fail to present a joint solution.
U.S. energy officials illegally neglected to study impacts to the environment in efforts to increase plutonium production for nuclear weapons in New Mexico and South Carolina, a federal judge has ruled.
South Carolina District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis sided with environmental, anti-nuclear proliferation and community groups last week who sued the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the nuclear weapons stockpile as part of the U.S. Department of Energy.
The U.S. is investing billions into restarting the manufacture of plutonium “pits,” the grapefruit-sized spheres developed for nuclear weapons. The federal government halted its manufacturing program at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado in 1989 after an FBI raid due to safety concerns and environmental crimes.
The stated goal has been to produce 80 pits per year starting in 2030, split between Savannah River facility proposed in South Carolina and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The project has faced safetyconcerns and delays. The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found the NNSA had no comprehensive timeline or cost estimate for pit production, but estimates it’s in the tens of billions of dollars.
Community, environment and anti-nuclear groups brought the lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the NNSA failed to consider alternatives to its two-site proposal and violated the law by not reviewing or changing its last analysis from 2008, when it approved the decisions to move forward in 2020. Continue reading→
In a statement Jay Coghlan, the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, said, “These agencies think they can proceed with their most expensive and complex project ever without required public analyses and credible cost estimates.”
A federal judge ruled this week that some nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. do violate environmental regulations.
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the National Nuclear Security Administration violated environmental regulations by failing to adequately assess the environmental impact of its plan to expand plutonium pit production at facilities in South Carolina and New Mexico.
The case involves a lawsuit that targeted a 2018 plan to establish two plutonium pit production sites—one at South Carolina’s Savannah River and the other at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Plaintiffs argued the plan was based on an outdated environmental impact study, which failed to properly assess the implications of simultaneous production at both locations. They also insisted the plan weakened safety and accountability measures for the multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons program and its associated waste disposal.
In the ruling on Thursday, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis said, “Defendants neglected to properly consider the combined effects of their two-site strategy and have failed to convince the court they gave thought to how those effects would affect the environment.”
“Public scrutiny is especially important because the activities at issue here, by their very nature, result in the production of dangerous weapons and extensive amounts of toxic and radioactive waste,” a plaintiffs’ lawyer said.
In what advocates called a major win for frontline communities and the rule of law, a U.S. district court judge ruled on Monday that the federal government could not move forward with producing plutonium pits—”the heart and trigger of a nuclear bomb“—at two proposed sites in New Mexico and South Carolina.
Instead, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis agreed with a coalition of nonprofit community groups that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to fully consider alternatives to producing the pits at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and South Carolina’s Savannah River Site (SRS). Now, the federal government must conduct a full environmental impact statement of how pit production would work at sites across the U.S.
“This is a significant victory that will ensure NEPA’s goal of public participation is satisfied,” attorney for the plaintiffs Ben Cunningham, of the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, said in a statement. “Public scrutiny is especially important because the activities at issue here, by their very nature, result in the production of dangerous weapons and extensive amounts of toxic and radioactive waste. I hope the public will seize the upcoming opportunity to review and comment on the federal agencies’ assessment.”
Plutonium-rich samples from Acid Canyon, Los Alamos. Credit: Michael Ketterer.
A new study has revealed alarming levels of plutonium contamination near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site where the first atomic bomb was developed. Radioactive contamination at Los Alamos may sound unsurprising but cleanup efforts by the U.S. government during the 1960s supposedly reduced it to safe levels. Today, the region welcomes many hikers and outdoor enthusiasts who embark on its trails.
The findings have led researchers and watchdog groups to call for immediate federal action. However, the government maintains that the area is safe for recreational use.
The contamination is concentrated in Acid Canyon, a site that once served as a dumping ground for nuclear waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Michael Ketterer, a Northern Arizona University scientist and lead researcher on the project, described the situation as unprecedented in his decades-long career.
“What I found here in Acid Canyon is pretty much the most extreme plutonium contamination scenario . . . in an off-site, uncontrolled environmental setting that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Ketterer told the New Mexico Political Report, adding that the contamination levels are comparable to those found near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.
A Hidden Legacy of Contamination
Credit: ABC News.
Acid Canyon’s contamination stems from its history as a disposal site for radioactive waste from 1943 until 1963. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, under the direction of the Department of Defense, piped liquid nuclear waste into the canyon. Over the years, the site has been the focus of cleanup efforts. But Ketterer’s recent findings suggest that those efforts may not have been sufficient at all.
A new study has made a troubling discovery about the health of ecosystems near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was born.
Scientists measured plutonium levels in recreational areas near the nuclear site and found they were similar to those detected at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine.
What’s happening?
According to the Guardian, a Northern Arizona University research team discovered “extreme concentrations” of plutonium in the soil, plants, and water near Los Alamos.
Michael Ketterer, a NAU scientist and the study’s lead researcher, told the outlet that plutonium concentrations near New Mexico’s Acid Canyon — a popular hiking and recreational spot — were some of the highest he’d ever encountered in public spaces in the U.S. throughout his career.
“This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” he told the Guardian, adding that the radioactive material is “hiding in plain sight.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense recently unveiled plans to increase production of plutonium pits — a critical part of nuclear weapons — at the Los Alamos site.
Water samples from Acid Canyon in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 22 July 2024. Photograph: Michael Ketterer/AP
Soil, plants and water along popular recreation spots near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, are contaminated with “extreme concentrations” of plutonium, a new study has found, but calls for the federal government to act have been dismissed.
Michael Ketterer, a Northern Arizona University scientist and lead researcher on the project, said the plutonium levels in and around New Mexico’s Acid Canyon were among the highest he had ever seen in a publicly accessible area in the US during his decades-long career – comparable to what is found in Ukraine at the site of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
The radioactive isotopes are “hiding in plain sight”, Ketterer said.
“This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” he said.
The paper comes on the heels of the US Department of Defense announcing it will ramp up production of plutonium pits, a core component of nuclear weapons, at Los Alamos. Meanwhile, the US Senate approved a defense bill with expanded funding for those exposed to the government’s radioactive waste. Local public health advocates say they are outraged by the exclusion of the Los Alamos region from the benefits.
Los Alamos Researcher Warns of Plutonium in Rec Areas
The federal Atomic Energy Commission turned over New Mexico land around its national laboratory decades ago to Los Alamos County without restricting its use, despite its past as the site where the atomic bomb was developed. Much of it was developed for recreational use. Researchers say there’s a problem: They’ve detected “extreme concentrations” of plutonium in the area, which hikers and others aren’t aware of when they head down a trail, the Guardian reports. “This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” said Michael Ketterer of Northern Arizona University, the project’s lead researcher.
Plutonium levels detected around Acid Canyon were among the highest Ketterer said he’s seen in a publicly accessible area in the US, and are comparable to those at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. People using the trails aren’t in immediate danger, he said, while warning that plutonium can get into water supplies that eventually reach the Rio Grande. It also can enter the food chain through plants or spread widely in ash during a wildfire. The Department of Energy issued a statement saying that the levels were “very low and well within the safe exposure range.” Public health advocates want warning signs to go up for recreational users.
Mapping by a local public health advocacy group, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, that used public records also showed high plutonium levels at sample sites throughout the area, per the Guardian. The research shows “New Mexico will forever be saddled with a radioactive isotope that has a 24,000-year half-life,” said Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium advocacy group. Ketterer said cleanup—removing the contamination—isn’t practical, per the AP. “It really can’t be undone,” he said.Canyon.
A map of the areas sampled by analytical chemist Michael Ketterer who released his findings of legacy plutonium waste in Los Alamos’ Acid Canyon. (Courtesy of Michael Ketterer)
Los Alamos, the Atomic City, is facing a legacy of its nickname.
High levels of plutonium present in samples taken in July from soil, plants and water in Los Alamos’ Acid Canyon may be the oldest contamination in the state, predating the 1945 Trinity Site atomic test, said Michael Ketterer, an analytical chemist and retired professor of chemistry from Northern Arizona University.
“There are some references to contamination being introduced into Acid Canyon starting in 1943,” he said Thursday. “It is very logical to me that this is some of the earliest produced material.”
The legacy plutonium contamination estimated to have lasted into the 1960s is still impacting the land, water and potentially human health, he said in a presentation hosted by Nuclear Watch NM.
“What I’ve found here in Acid Canyon, my friends, is I’d say pretty much the most extreme plutonium contamination scenario I’ve seen in an offsite, uncontrolled environmental setting,” Ketterer said, alluding to thousands of plutonium samples he’s analyzed in his 20-year career.
He said that contamination levels surpass samples he took at private properties around the former plutonium pit production site in Rocky Flats, Colorado.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (KRQE) – New findings from a study aimed at researching how much plutonium is in the ground and water near Los Alamos National Laboratory, have the lead scientists concerned.
“I’m just trying to show New Mexicans what the truth is here,” said Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University. Over the last few months, Dr. Ketterer has collected and analyzed plutonium levels from a trailhead at Acid Canyon in Los Alamos, NM.
“I see a lot of things to be concerned about here,” Dr. Ketterer said.
In his study, Dr. Ketterer says he found “alarmingly high results” of plutonium contamination. Though radiation levels are not high enough to hurt people walking the trail, advocates with Nuclear Watch New Mexico worry about what could happen if a fire broke out, warning that the smoke inhaled could lead to lung cancer.
“Were Acid Canyon to burn in a wildfire, and we know that threat is all too real, that could be dangerous in the form of respirable plutonium that is released to the air through wildfire,” said Jay Coghlan, Executive Director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“We can’t really predict where it’s going to go and how bad it’s going to be,” added Dr. Ketterer about the possibility of a fire happening in the area.
The legacy of environmental waste is “hiding in plain sight” at a popular open space in the heart of Los Alamos that became a dumping ground during the Manhattan Project, according to testing results a nuclear watchdog group released Thursday.
Soil, plant and water samples collected in July from Acid Canyon — yes, Acid Canyon — revealed “extreme contamination,” including detections of what Nuclear Watch New Mexico said is some of the earliest plutonium produced by humankind.
“What I found here in Acid Canyon [is] pretty much the most extreme contamination scenario I’ve seen in an off-site, uncontrolled environmental setting,” Michael Ketterer, a professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, said during a virtual briefing.
Ketterer, who collected the samples in July with the help of the watchdog group, said he’s analyzed tens of thousands of plutonium samples in a decadeslong career.
“This is way, way, way, way, way at the top end of the charts in terms of how much,” he said. “This is extreme contamination.”
Ketterer said he would compare it to “Chernobyl proximity samples” and samples close to Palomares, Spain, after a B-52 bomber carrying hydrogen bombs collided with a refueling plane in 1966 and coated the seaside town in radioactive dust.
“Hundreds of samples from near Rocky Flats do not come close at all,” he said, referring to a former nuclear weapons production facility in Colorado.
“This is an unrestricted area. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the United States,” the professor told reporters. “It’s just an extreme example of very high concentrations of plutonium in soils and sediments. Really, you know, it’s hiding in plain sight.”
Ketterer teamed up with the group Nuclear Watch New Mexico to gather the samples in July, a rainy period that often results in isolated downpours and stormwater runoff coursing through canyons and otherwise dry arroyos. Water was flowing through Acid Canyon when the samples were taken.
This July 21, 2024, image provided by Michael Ketterer shows vegetation from Acid Canyon and lower Los Alamos Canyon near Los Alamos, N.M., after being milled as part of a sampling project. (Michael Ketterer via AP)
This July 22, 2024, image provided by Michael Ketterer shows jars of water samples from Acid Canyon in Los Alamos, N.M. (Michael Ketterer via AP)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons.
A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon said Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career.
While outdoor enthusiasts might not be in immediate danger while traveling through the pine tree-lined canyon, Michael Ketterer — who specializes in tracking the chemical fingerprints of radioactive materials — said state and local officials should be warning people to avoid coming in contact with water in Acid Canyon.
The world’s oldest documented plutonium contamination may not lie not in the Chihuahuan Desert at the Trinity Site, where the first-ever atomic bomb ripped open the skies and melted the sand into green glass. Rather, that distinction more likely goes to Los Alamos’s Acid Canyon, according to an independent study by Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University.
Ketterer announced these findings at an online press conference held by Nuclear Watch New Mexico on Aug. 15, after collecting and analyzing soil, water and plant samples in Acid Canyon, a popular hiking area in the middle of town. Beginning in 1943, the year the Manhattan Project came to Los Alamos, workers released radioactive waste into the canyon. Three remediations would follow, but as Ketterer’s analysis found, “a super weapons-grade” plutonium persists in the soil, water and plant life in and around Los Alamos, representing some of the earliest ever made.
One thought came to his mind as he analyzed samples from the area, collected last month:
“I’ve never seen anything like this in any samples anywhere,” he told Searchlight New Mexico in an interview.
Jay Coghlan at Nuclear Watch New Mexico read a letter to officials from Archbishop of Santa Fe John Wester, a critic of nuclear proliferation advocating for disarmament. He called for a sitewide environmental review of Los Alamos National Laboratory before the government expands the lab’s activities.
“Nuclear weapons were invented here in my arch dioceses, and thus I feel a responsibility to address this threat,” Coghlan read. “Nuclear disarmament is a right to life issue. The very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. What does this say about expanded pit production without providing the public the opportunity to review and comment?
“You’re very good at creating them, now show us how smart you are by showing us how to get rid of nuclear weapons. Let’s preserve New Mexico’s potential to manifest God’s love for all of his creations.”
New Mexico was a fixture in the federal government’s plans to develop more nuclear weapons in the northern part of the state, and that could mean more nuclear waste being sent the southeast corner.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad disposes of transuranic (TRU) nuclear waste, made up of clothing materials, equipment and other debris irradiated during nuclear activities at federal sites around the country. It’s trucked into the site and buried in a salt deposit about 2,000 feet underground.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy through its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is planning to build up to 30 plutonium pits – triggers for nuclear warheads – per year by 2030, along with 50 a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Candice Robertson, senior adviser at the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) said during a Monday townhall in Santa Fe that WIPP did have enough space for “planned TRU waste,” as officials estimated the repository could remain active until about 2083.
A group of anti-nuclear activists used data from Los Alamos National Laboratory to map places where plutonium contamination has been found in areas near the lab. Nuclear Watch New Mexico says that the data indicates plutonium contamination has migrated through the subsurface and into important water sources. The group called for comprehensive cleanup at LANL. […]
“Nuclear Watch New Mexico believes comprehensive cleanup is imperative, especially in light of expanding nuclear weapons programs.”
A group of anti-nuclear activists used data from Los Alamos National Laboratory to map places where plutonium contamination has been found in areas near the lab.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico says that the data indicates plutonium contamination has migrated through the subsurface and into important water sources. The group called for comprehensive cleanup at LANL.
The data is publicly available and there are more than 100,000 samples for plutonium dating from 1970 to 2023. However, Sophia Stroud, a digital content manager for Nuclear Watch New Mexico, explained that they did not want to include samples on their map that could be linked to fallout from nuclear weapons testing rather than activities at the lab.
They narrowed down the samples to remove plutonium samples that could have come from nuclear weapon testing. That left about 58,100 samples that were taken from below ground between 1992 and 2023.
Of those samples, about 70 percent of them were below detectable levels of plutonium.
Plutonium hotspots appear along tribal lands, hiking trails, city streets and the Rio Grande River, a watchdog group finds
“Nuclear Watch’s driving question, according to Scott Kovac, its operations and research director, concerned a specific pattern of contamination: Had plutonium migrated from LANL dump sites into regional groundwater? The answer, Kovac believes, is yes.”
For years, the public had no clear picture of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium footprint. Had the ubiquitous plutonium at LANL infiltrated the soil? The water? Had it migrated outside the boundary of the laboratory itself?
A series of maps published by Nuclear Watch New Mexico are beginning to answer these questions and chart the troubling extent of plutonium on the hill. One map is included below, while an interactive version appears on Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s website. The raw data for both comes from Intellus New Mexico, a publicly accessible clearinghouse of some 16 million environmental monitoring records offered in recent decades by LANL, the New Mexico Environment Department and the Department of Energy.
Approximately 58,100 red dots populate each map at 12,730 locations, marking a constellation of points where plutonium — a radioactive element used in nuclear weapons — was found in the groundwater, surface water or soil. What’s alarming is just how far that contamination extends, from Bandelier National Monument to the east and the Santa Fe National Forest to the north, to San Ildefonso tribal lands in the west and the Rio Grande River and Santa Fe County, to the south.
The points, altogether, tell a story about the porous boundary between LANL and its surrounds. So pervasive is the lab’s footprint that plutonium can be found in both trace and notable amounts along hiking trails, near a nursing home, in parks, along major thoroughfares and in the Rio Grande.
Gauging whether or not the levels of plutonium are a health risk is challenging: Many physicians and advocates say no dose of radiation is safe. But when questions about risk arise, one of the few points of reference is the standard used at Rocky Flats in Colorado, where the maximum allowable amount of plutonium in remediated soil was 50 picocuries per gram. Many sites on the Nuclear Watch map have readings below this amount. Colorado’s construction standard, by contrast, is 0.9 picocuries per gram.
“[NukeWatch] argued [their] plutonium migration map provides “compelling evidence of the need for a comprehensive cleanup” at the lab. The Department of Energy instead has proposed a plan to “cap and cover” 190,000 cubic yards of waste in unlined pits and trenches, at an estimated cost of $12 million.
Many local organizations and community leaders, including the Santa Fe County Commission, have opposed the plan, and the New Mexico Environment Department issued a draft order in September calling for a full cleanup — at a cost of about $800 million.”
Nuclear Watch New Mexico says it has created an interactive map showing plutonium migration from Los Alamos National Laboratory based on the lab’s database of environmental sampling. The map of 58,100 sampling sites, including 17,483 where the element was detected, shows trace amounts of the radioactive element as far away as Cochiti Lake, the group says.
Courtesy Nuclear Watch New Mexico
Trace amounts of plutonium from decades of weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory have contaminated the Rio Grande at least as far as Cochiti Lake and could be in the regional aquifer that serves a large population of New Mexicans, a nuclear watchdog says.
“That’s been long known,” Nuclear Watch New Mexico Director Jay Coghlan said in a virtual briefing Thursday morning, when the organization unveiled a map of plutonium migration it said was created with LANL’s own data.
“Nevertheless, it’s not generally known by the New Mexican public,” Coghlan said. “What is ‘new news’ is publicly calling that out.”
Nuclear Watch used what it called the lab’s publicly accessible but cumbersome environmental database, Intellus New Mexico, to map 58,100 spots where the lab collected samples between 1992 and 2023, including 17,483 labeled as plutonium “detects.” The interactive map shows the date each sample was collected and the level of plutonium detected, with two “detects” cited in Cochiti Lake, dozens in the Rio Grande east of Los Alamos and thousands around the lab.
“In an email, an anti-nuclear watchdog argued the 10 incidents the board lists in the report were “potentially dangerous.”
“The discouraging overall trend is the accelerating frequency of these events as LANL ramps up expanded plutonium pit production,” wrote Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “The Lab feeds the public with empty assurances of safety. However, this trend deserves meaningful course correction before, and not after, LANL begins production.””
Los Alamos National Laboratory is not doing all it can to detect radioactive leaks in glove boxes and prevent the release of airborne contaminants, a federal watchdog said in a review it conducted of the equipment and safety programs after a series of mishaps.
The equipment, made up of sealed compartments and attached protective gloves, aids workers in handling radioactive materials and is deemed essential in the lab ramping up production of plutonium cores, or pits, that trigger nuclear warheads.
Although the lab is addressing problems previously identified with glove box operations — worn gloves not changed soon enough, inadequate staffing and training, leaky ports not sealed — a team found several other deficiencies that should be fixed to reduce hazards, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wrote in a 13-page report.
“A report from Nuclear Watch New Mexico posited pit production would generate 57,550 cubic meters of the waste over 50 years, more than half of WIPP’s projected future capacity. This assertion was backed up by a 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences finding WIPP could lack sufficient space for disposal of surplus plutonium and other DOE planned waste streams in the coming decades.”
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are hoping to decontaminate some of the nuclear waste from the lab that would otherwise be disposed of at a repository near Carlsbad, as the lab was planning to ramp its production of plutonium pits used to trigger warheads.
Transuranic (TRU) waste from the lab and other Department of Energy facilities is disposed of via burial at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in a 2,000-foot-deep salt deposit about 30 miles east of Carlsbad. TRU waste is made up of clothing, equipment and debris irradiated during nuclear research and other activities.
Are America’s plutonium pits too old to perform in the new Cold War? Or are new ones necessary?
“To look at short-term change [in plutonium pits], scientists have created experiments sensitive enough to detect what happens in real time. There are caveats, though. “There seems to be a corrective mechanism that heals some of that change on longer time scales,” according to Dylan Spaulding, who studies the issue of pit aging for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Raymond Jeanloz agrees: “Something happens over longer time periods that makes [the metal] almost as good as new or maybe as good as new over time periods of 10 or 20 years or more.”
Sprinkled across five western states, in silos buried deep underground and protected by reinforced concrete, sit 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each of those missiles is equipped with a single nuclear warhead. And each of those warheads is itself equipped with one hollow, grapefruit-sized plutonium pit, designed to trigger a string of deadly reactions.
All of those missiles are on “hair-trigger alert,” poised for hundreds of targets in Russia — any one of which could raze all of downtown Moscow and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Except — what if it doesn’t? What if, in a nuclear exchange, the pit fizzles because it’s just too old? In that case, would the weapon be a total dud or simply yield but a fraction of its latent power?
Outwardly, at least, that’s the question driving a whole new era of plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina.
“The issue of plutonium pit aging is a Trojan horse for the nuclear weaponeers enriching themselves through a dangerous new arms race,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear group based in Santa Fe. “Future pit production is not about maintaining the existing, extensively tested stockpile. Instead, it’s for deploying multiple new warheads on new intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, successfully lobbied former U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman in 2006 for an amendment to require a plutonium pit aging study by the group of scientists called JASON. Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico Nadav Soroker
“…Anti-nuclear activists contend the increasing number of glove box mishaps are part of a trend that will continue as the lab processes more plutonium, partly in pursuit of making the bowling ball-sized cores, or pits, that detonate warheads.
“It’s reasonable to assume it will accelerate with expanded [pit] production,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.”
A Los Alamos National Laboratory worker recently punctured a glove used to handle radioactive material in a sealed compartment, and wind blew airborne tritium into the liquid waste treatment facility a few weeks earlier, a federal watchdog reported.
The worker punctured the glove while handling a sharp measuring caliper instead of an electronic device that’s normally used for the task but was disabled, according to an October report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The breach contaminated a protective glove the worker was wearing but not the skin, and it didn’t cause an airborne radioactive release, the report said.
This is the second glove box breach in as many months and among a half-dozen the safety board has reported this year.
“Scott Kovac, Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s operations director, agreed getting a third set of eyes on the project would be helpful, especially if this expert can suggest an alternative to the pump-and-treat method.”
Federal officials said Wednesday they were pursuing an independent expert to help resolve their dispute with the state on how to clean up a decades-old toxic chromium plume under Los Alamos National Laboratory that has worsened since pumping was shut down seven months ago.
State regulators in March ordered the U.S. Energy Department to stop extracting tainted water, treating it and injecting it back into the 1.5-mile-long plume to dilute the pollution, contending this approach pushed the contaminants toward San Ildefonso Pueblo and deeper into the aquifer.
At a Wednesday meeting, a federal cleanup manager reiterated the Energy Department’s position the pump-and-treat method was reducing the hexavalent chromium and keeping it from spreading to the pueblo — and with the work halted, the contamination is rebounding.
“We’ve erased a lot of the gains we’ve made over the last few years of operating [by shutting down],” said Michael Mikolanis, head of the Energy Department’s environmental management in Los Alamos.
The worsening situation increases the urgency to bring in a third party that can provide fresh analysis and a different perspective to help move the state and federal agencies past their impasse, Mikolanis said.
An anti-nuclear watchdog group contends the pits’ main purpose is to be fitted into the new warheads — not to upgrade existing weapons — and expanding the arsenal requires more pits than the lab can make.
“The commission ill-advisedly wants a replacement for LANL’s plutonium pit production facility to help fuel the new nuclear arms race with new-design nuclear weapons,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, wrote in an email. “This is so tragic and unnecessary when no future pit production is scheduled to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, extensively tested stockpile.”
A congressional commission foresees eventually replacing Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility — despite the billions of dollars being spent to refurbish it — as part of its recommended strategy to bolster the U.S. nuclear arsenal to keep pace with Russia and China.
The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission has released a 160-page report that pushes for the U.S. to boost its nuclear capabilities and conventional military to deter what it describes as increasingly aggressive and well-equipped adversaries, namely Russia and China.
One section calls for improving and expanding infrastructure to research, develop and make better weaponry at a higher volume — and buried in a footnote is a statement of how the upgrades would include replacing the lab’s plutonium facility, known as PF-4, for production and science.
No timeline is given for when PF-4 might be phased out, but the document confirms anti-nuclear critics’ longtime contention the federal government is spending billions of dollars on a facility with a finite life.
At the moment, this is the only facility in the country that can produce the bowling-ball-sized plutonium cores, or “pits,” to detonate warheads. Nuclear security officials want the lab to make 30 pits a year by 2030, saying they’re needed to modernize the arsenal and equip two new warheads being developed.
An informal gathering was held from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday at Ashley Pond Park to recognize the harm of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan 78 years ago. Participants included representatives of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Veterans for Peace and Nonviolent Santa Fe, who carried posters and banners and meditated in a shelter at the south side of the park.
BY ARCHBISHOP JOHN C. WESTER of Santa Fe ARCHBISHOP PAUL D. ETIENNE of Seattle ARCHBISHOP PETER MICHIAKI NAKAMURA of Nagasaki BISHOP ALEXIS SHIRAH of Hiroshima ARCHBISHOP EMERITUS JOSEPH MITSUAKI TAKAMI of Nagasaki
On the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we, the bishops of four Catholic arch/dioceses in areas impacted by nuclear weapons, declare that we will begin working together to achieve a “world without nuclear weapons.” We urge that there be concrete progress made by August 2025, the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings.
In the spirit and teaching of Pope Francis, we recognize that even the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral.
New Mexicans are integral to the history of atomic development and testing, but they’re nowhere to be seen on screen.
“We’ve been slept-walked into a new nuclear arms race, arguably far more dangerous than the first,” said John C. Wester, Archbishop of Santa Fe. “I grew up in the duck-and-cover generation. Perhaps some of you remember that. I felt chills many decades later when I read that Robert McNamara, defense secretary during the Cuban Missile Crisis, said that we survived that crisis only by luck. Luck is not a sustainable strategy for the survival of the human family.”
Jay Coghlan, of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, emphasized the danger from renewed plutonium pit production at Los Alamos, which he sees as both unnecessary for nuclear deterrence, and as risking development of new nuclear weapons.
In Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic “Oppenheimer,” released last week, the Manhattan Project comes to New Mexico largely because J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) wishes it so. The film was shot in the Land of Enchantment with a hastily assembled Ghost Ranch set serving as the film’s freshly constructed Los Alamos. “Oppenheimer” features New Mexico as setting, backdrop, and refuge for the transplant scientists and military men who spent World War II developing the atom bomb. The film does not show the people already living in New Mexico, neither before the first shovel hits the dirt nor after Trinity’s radioactive fallout creates the first downwinders.
“It’s difficult to comprehend the level of contamination, the diversion of amounts of money into something that, in my view, will not improve national security,” says Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again
Something unusual is happening inside the plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. PF-4, as it is known to top government officials, is the heart of America’s nuclear complex, a lab where scientists and engineers study and experiment on highly radioactive materials in tight secrecy…
“Tina Cordova is an activist seeking justice for the unknowing, unwilling, and uncompensated, innocent victims of the July 16, 1945, Trinity Test in south-central New Mexico.”
As the world eagerly awaits a sneak peek at Christopher Nolan’s film, “Oppenheimer,” a New Mexico community continues to be haunted by the legacy of the scientist the film portrays.
“Oppenheimer” explores the life of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the secretive Manhattan Project for nuclear weapons research and development during World War II.
SANTA FE — To commemorate the anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic weapon in 1945 at the nearby Trinity Test Site, the complete elimination of nuclear weapons must be prioritized. “From Reflection to Action:
An Interfaith Remembrance of the Trinity Test” will be held at the Santa Maria de la Paz Community Hall in Santa Fe, featuring music, speakers, exhibitions, and moments of reflection and prayer. The free public event is 4-6 p.m. (doors open at 3:15 p.m.), Sunday, July 16, 2023. Pre-registration is encouraged, and the event will be live streamed.
Every day, thousands of people from all parts of El Norte make the vertiginous drive up to Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s a trek that generations of New Mexicans have been making, like worker ants to the queen, from the eastern edge of the great Tewa Basin to the craggy Pajarito Plateau.
All in the pursuit of “good jobs.”
Some, inevitably, are bound for that most secretive and fortified place, Technical Area 55, the very heart of the weapons complex — home to PF-4, the lab’s plutonium handling facility, with its armed guards, concrete walls, steel doors and sporadic sirens. To enter “the plant,” as it’s known, is to get as close as possible to the existential nature of the nuclear age.
Over the next few years, the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility (PF-4) will undergo a paradigm shift to a large-scale production facility for weapon components, with the largest number of workers in its history. NNSA is investing billions of dollars in production-related infrastructure at Los Alamos, and the Board is continuing to urge commensurate investment in the safety infrastructure needed to ensure workers and the public are adequately protected from potential accidents at PF-4.
THE DEFENSE NUCLEAR FACILITIES SAFETY BOARD
For 40 years, some 250 workers were tasked, mostly, with research and design. But a multibillion-dollar mission to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal has brought about “a paradigm shift,” in the words of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal watchdog. Today, the plant is in the middle of a colossal expansion — growing from a single, aged building to what the safety board calls “a large-scale production facility for weapon components with the largest number of workers in its history.”
“Much has been written about constructing a nuclear waste storage facility in southeastern New Mexico. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already granted Holtec an initial license for construction and for a similar facility in west Texas. The mayor of Carlsbad, speaking also for Hobbs, has written a letter supporting this. This facility would be halfway between Carlsbad and Hobbs. Nuclear Watch NM and the Los Alamos Study Group oppose the facility…”
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and our congressional delegation have all spoken against it. Senate Bill 53, signed into law this session, bans such facilities in the state.
“New Mexico provides a particularly relevant space for this event. For instance, participants will learn about the history and the social, health, and economic impact of the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 for south central communities,” C&J Department Chair Ilia Rodriguez Nazario said.
In addition to Rodriguez Nazario featured at this unique event, local speakers are coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Covering the Atomic File is also welcoming experts from the National Security Council, the International Red Cross, Stanford University and George Washington University.
Whether it was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War or even New Mexico’s own Manhattan Project, nuclear tensions have been a longstanding component of international relations. Across each of these situations, journalists have been at the forefront of carefully understanding and reporting nuclear crises.
“…A nuclear watchdog group decried this series of breaches, arguing they reflect a systemic problem that’s likely to grow worse as plutonium activity increases with pit production.
“‘It’s just indicative of more problems to come,’ said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico”
Los Alamos National Laboratory had five breaches of the glove boxes used to handle radioactive materials in a four-week period, an unusually high number in such a short time.
The lab had three breaches in these sealed compartments at its plutonium facility between late March and mid-April and two more in the following week, according to the most recent reports by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the federal agency that provides recommendations and advice regarding public health and safety issues at Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities.
“There is…another concern about the NNSA’s plans: The designs of new warheads in which new plutonium pits would be used may depart from designs that have been previously tested. This could result in demands to resume explosive testing, which would undermine the moratorium on nuclear testing that has been observed by all nuclear-weapon states (other than North Korea) since 1998.”
The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos, in front of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Photo credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
For two decades, the Pentagon and Congress have been increasingly concerned that the United States does not have a reliable capability to produce plutonium “pits,” the cores of US thermonuclear warheads. In 2018, the agency responsible for the production and maintenance of US nuclear warheads, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), responded with a plan to build, on a crash basis, pit production lines in New Mexico and South Carolina at the same time, with a combined production capacity of 80 pits per year.
“We are working around the U.S and we are working with our international partners to develop verification technologies some of which are associated with imagining a world without nuclear and some that are associated with a test treaty with Russia and/or China,” Hruby said, saying to Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester that while she knows his vision is clear, she wanted to make these comments about “where NNSA is today so that it’s understood and not misunderstood”.
Nuke Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan told Hruby it strikes him that NNSA has been avoiding an update pit life study. He mentioned a 2005 Jason Study that concluded that plutonium pits last at least 100 years.
DOE-EM Senior Advisor William ‘Ike’ White, DOE NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, center, and Santa Fe County Commission Chair Anna Hansen following Tuesday’s town hall meeting in Santa Fe. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
It was described by some as a somewhat momentous occasion last Tuesday evening (April 4) when Jill Hruby and William “Ike” White joined Santa Fe County Commission Chair Anna Hansen on the dais for a hybrid town hall meeting at the Santa Fe Convention Center, which was attended by some 250 people in person and another 200 online.
“…Residents of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Los Alamos and beyond asked questions and made comments about nuclear production and disposal in New Mexico. The crowd addressed a pair of officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. There was hardly an empty seat in the auditorium; 150 others attended the town hall virtually. Speakers at the town hall generally focused on three main issues: increased production of plutonium pits, ramped up disposal of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and nuclear proliferation.”
Archbishop John Wester, left, and Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, listen as different people speak against plans to start pit production at LANL. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)
“We live in the third-most impoverished state in the nation, and yet we’re throwing away money to build weapons of war rather than take care of our own people…The U.S. must be the one to end the nuclear arms race because only then will other nations follow,” – Rikki Farrell of the ANSWER coalition
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said new pits will be used to equip two new warheads being developed. He asked whether these new designs could lead to a return to explosive nuclear testing underground.
Anti-nuclear weapons demonstrator Bobbe Besold watches Tuesday as a panel of representatives from Los Alamos National Laboratory answers questions at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. The lab has been tasked with increasing its production of plutonium pits for weapons to 30 per year by 2026.Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Anti-nuclear advocates showed up in force Tuesday to grill the head of the federal nuclear security agency at a town hall about plans to have Los Alamos National Laboratory make 30 plutonium pits for warheads a year, a pursuit that has generated heated controversy in Northern New Mexico since its inception. Continue reading→
Milestones to meet in the coming year are to work on three monitoring wells and complete two reports, said Scott Kovac, Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s operations director. He called the effort inadequate for a large contaminated area discovered two decades ago.
“We’re going to have to do better than that,” Kovac said after the meeting. “We should be a lot farther along by now.”
Kovac also questioned why the report on the lab’s site-wide groundwater monitoring should be deemed a milestone. It’s something that must be done every year, so the lab’s parent agency shouldn’t get points for it, he said.
State regulators’ order to halt injections of treated water into the sprawling chromium plume under Los Alamos National Laboratory will go into effect Saturday as scheduled, federal and state officials confirmed this week at an annual meeting to review cleanup of legacy waste.
Regulators say the technique of extracting contaminated water, treating it and pumping it back into the decades-old plume is not fixing or containing the problem but instead is stirring up the hexavalent chromium and pushing it both toward San Ildefonso Pueblo and deeper into the aquifer.
The U.S. Energy Department’s environmental managers at Los Alamos insist the pump-and-treat method is working to dilute the toxic chromium and prevent its spread but said at a Wednesday meeting they would cease injections on Friday.
“Right now, we don’t have another avenue for any of that extracted water, so it will effectively be turning off the system for the interim measure for the chromium plume treatment,” said Troy Thomson, environmental remediation program manager for N3B, the lab’s legacy waste cleanup contractor.
A state Environment Department manager reiterated the agency’s position that the injection wells were placed inside the plume rather than on the borders, causing the injected water to spread the contaminants outward.
Concerning the article “presenting the nationwide look at the last year’s most terrible transparency,” the Santa Fe Reporter could have stayed home and reported on its own backyard. The Department of Energy and the Los Alamos National Laboratory are notorious for their lengthy delays in honoring Freedom of Information Act requests. As a federal judge ruled in one of our FOIA lawsuits, “administrative officials invoke every conceivable delaying technique and force citizens requesting information under the FOIA to resort to expensive litigation for vindication of their rights. Information is often useful only if it is timely. Thus, excessive delay by the agency in its response is often tantamount to denial.”
“The performance evaluation report was released after Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a lawsuit asking the court to require the NNSA to release its performance evaluation reports for all eight nuclear weapons research and production sites.”
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions earned a rating of “very good” from the National Nuclear Security Administration and will receive over $39 million of the nearly $44 million available to it during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2022 according to a recently released performance evaluation report.
“One watchdog group, which requested the complete reports, said the lab appears to have consistent struggles in its quest to produce pits.
“’It’s more indication that production is prioritized over safety,’” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “’And even then, there’s apparent problems with production.’”
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s primary contractor earned an overall good rating on a federal performance review but continued to wrestle with worker safety problems, production inefficiencies and staying on schedule on projects required to make nuclear warhead triggers by the target date.
The GAO report said the lack of detailed estimates of the costs, time and resources involved is especially glaring because this is the largest and most expensive weapons project undertaken by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department branch that oversees the arsenal.
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said an agency that boasts about having top-level technicians should have no problem supplying all the necessary information about pit production, including total costs.”
Estimates for costs and the time required to produce nuclear bomb cores, including 30 per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory, are severely lacking and could make it difficult for federal managers to avoid cost overruns, delays and other problems, a government watchdog said in a report released Thursday.
The plan for the lab and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to produce a combined 80 nuclear warhead triggers, or “pits,” each year by 2035 is a massive, complex undertaking that demands detailed scheduling, a careful accounting of costs and clear estimates of how long various tasks will take — none of which are being done by the federal agency in charge of nuclear weapons, the Government Accountability Office said in its 78-page report.
The U.S. agency in charge of jumpstarting the production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal is falling short when it comes to having a comprehensive schedule for the multibillion-dollar project
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, pointed to some of the price tags associated with the project having doubled over the last four years. He said production overall at the two sites could cost at least $60 billion over 30 years with radioactive waste disposal and other environmental and public health concerns adding to the bill.
“Until Congress and the New Mexican delegation demand credible cost estimates and schedules, Coghlan said lawmakers “should stop rewarding the guilty with yet more money…That is simple good governance that could help slow our sleepwalk into the new and unpredictable nuclear arms race,” he said.
“It’s the lowest score on the lowest bar of so-called cleanup,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “I’m going to very much point my finger at the weak and defective 2016 consent order.”
Coghlan is among the critics who have bashed this cleanup agreement crafted under Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, saying it weakened the original 2005 order by eliminating real deadlines and imposing few penalties for slow or deficient work.
The contractor in charge of cleaning up Los Alamos National Laboratory’s legacy waste will receive the lowest percentage of its yearly bonus in its four years at the lab, mainly because of deficiencies in worker safety and packaging waste for shipping.
Newport News BWXT, commonly known as N3B, received 77% of its bonus fees for the year ending in October, the lowest since it began cleaning up the lab’s pre-1999 waste in 2018 and the first time the portion fell below 80%.
The U.S. Energy Department’s Environmental Management Field Office at Los Alamos issues the scorecards that determine how much of a bonus fee N3B will get in a given year under its $1.4 billion, 10-year contract for the cleanup work.
The contractor will be awarded about $7.16 million out of a possible $9.2 million, according to the 2022 scorecard.
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said there’s a long list of Environment Department officials who went to work for the lab or the agencies that manage it.
He noted Chris Catechis, acting director of the state Resources Protection Division, is going to work for the lab just weeks after Stringer took a job with the nuclear security agency.”
A nuclear watchdog group wants a state commission to nullify its decision on a permit for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s radioactive liquid waste treatment facility, arguing the panel’s former chairwoman backed a ruling favorable to the lab while she sought a job with the federal agency that oversees it.
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said given the reported problems the lab and Savannah River are grappling with, the review might be trying to add “wiggle room” to production goals.
“It’s interesting how vague the Nuclear Posture Review is on both the rate and timing of pit production,” Coghlan said.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory received only a brief mention in the Biden administration’s much-awaited update of the country’s nuclear strategy, but it’s clear the Pentagon views …
“A lawsuit remains before a federal judge in South Carolina in which the plaintiffs – SRS Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM) and Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA) – have demanded that a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) on pit production be prepared. The PEIS would analyze impacts of pit production at all DOE sites, including heretofore unanalyzed disposal of plutonium by-product waste (transuranic waste) from pit production in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.”
SRS Pit Plant would Fabricate Plutonium Pits (Cores) for New and Old Nuclear Weapons; Schedule Delays, Cost Increases Mounting, with Cost Nearing $12 Billion
Our prediction that the unneeded SRS plutonium pit plant would continue to face significant delays and substantial cost increases is sadly being proven true”
— Tom Clements, Director, SRS Watch
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, US – A facility proposed to make the key plutonium component for new U.S. nuclear warheads faces another substantial delay, according a U.S. Department of Energy official at a nuclear meeting this week in South Carolina. The delay of construction of the Plutonium Bomb Plant, proposed to make plutonium “pits” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s sprawling 310-square-mile Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, SC, could push the price tag to $11.5 billion or higher.
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the lab has a history of delays and cost overruns that predates the pandemic.
“I suspect LANL and [the federal government] are using COVID as a convenient excuse for what’s going to happen anyway,” Coghlan said. “I’m certainly not saying there was no delay for COVID, but I doubt this much.”
Coghlan said the revelation is significant because it’s the first official confirmation the Los Alamos lab is running behind schedule with its planned pit production.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory (Jathan Campbell/Los Alamos National Laboratory )
(Tribune News Service) — Los Alamos National Laboratory’s effort to produce 30 nuclear bomb cores a year by 2026 was stalled for 13 months because of the coronavirus pandemic, calling into question whether it can make the much-touted target.
An anti-nuclear activist obtained a redacted management plan for the lab’s plutonium operations through a Freedom of Information Act Request, which describes how the production deadline is more likely to be missed because of preparatory work being delayed during a hard-hitting stretch of the pandemic.
“Coghlan said an example of why the full assessment is necessary is a note on last year’s report for the Los Alamos lab saying it had struggled with some production activities and experienced several challenges carrying out the plutonium mission, and “mission execution was impacted by lapses in safety performance.”
A New Mexico watchdog group is suing the federal agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons programs for issuing only summaries of its yearly report cards on national laboratories and withholding what the group contends is vital information on deficiencies.
The lawsuit seeks to compel the National Nuclear Security Administration to post in its public reading room the complete report cards for the eight national laboratories involved in nuclear weapons — ones it has withheld in the past and all future assessments.
Allowing the public to see, in particular, the full report on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s shortcomings is increasingly important as the lab gears up to make 30 plutonium bomb cores a year with an escalating federal budget, Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s yearly report cards assess the performances of contracted lab operators and award bonuses to the organizations based on their grades in a process that is not classified, Coghlan argued. Continue reading→
In a new lawsuit, the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Santa Fe, demanded that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) turn over “full and complete Performance Evaluation Reports” for the contractors managing the agency’s nuclear-weapon…
“Scoping” means determining the issues that should be included in public analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of proposed major actions by the federal government. According to the Department of Energy ‘s own NEPA implementation regulations, DOE must prepare a new or supplemental site-wide environmental impact statement (SWEIS) for its major sites when there are “significant new circumstances or information relevant to environmental concerns.” The last site-wide EIS for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was completed in 2008 and is badly outdated. Moreover, since 2018 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), DOE’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, has been aggressively expanding the production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores for nuclear weapons at the Lab.
“Los Alamos lab’s plutonium modernization funding would climb to $1.56 billion from this year’s $1 billion, a more than 50 percent increase.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, expressed concerns about the agency indicating it saw no need to assess expanded pit production itself in the review.
“NNSA’s dubious argument is that it performed the legally required NEPA analysis for expanded plutonium pit production” in past assessments, Coghlan wrote.”
The federal agency that oversees nuclear weapons will hold two hearings this week to give the public a chance to comment about the first full sitewide environmental review of Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2008.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is conducting the sitewide review of the lab under the National Environmental Protection Act — breaking from its past resistance to doing fresh analysis of possible impacts as the lab gears up to annually produce 30 plutonium bomb pits by 2026.
“Locally, while the lab grabs tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars for new, counterproductive nuclear weapons production, it plans to “cap and cover” and leave buried some 200,000 cubic yards of toxic and radioactive wastes that will permanently threaten our precious water resources.”
The New Mexican‘s recent editorial on Los Alamos National Laboratory noted “LANL’s astounding growth” (“LANL’s growth creates pressure on safety,” Our View, Aug. 31). Cancer is defined as uncontrollable cellular growth invading other parts of the body. That is fitting here as the lab metastasizes into the city of Santa Fe (in English, “Holy Faith”). The potentially terminal disease is a second nuclear arms race. Ex-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said we survived the first arms race only by luck.
Where is the leadership, where is the vision? While busy legislating short-term nuclear pork benefiting the already privileged, our congressional delegation leads us toward Armageddon. This second arms race is more dangerous than the first because of multiple nuclear adversaries, new cyber and hypersonic weapons, and artificial intelligence. All of this destabilizes the old Cold War architecture of mutually assured destruction (which never really went away). But “MAD” is truly insane to begin with, involving total, civilization-destroying war.
Dozens of environmental groups, non-government organizations and individuals have signed a request to the Department of Energy for a two-month extension of the Oct. 3 comment deadline for scoping comments on a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement for continued operations of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
A letter sent Tuesday states that the current comment period is simply not enough time for the public to make meaningful comments on the scope of a proposal as large, complex and technical as the LANL SWEIS. It is addressed to Sec. of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Under Secretary for Nuclear Security Jill Hruby, DOE/NNSA Los Alamos Field Office Manager Ted Wyka and NNSA’s NEPA Compliance Officer at LANL Kristen Dors. The top two signatories are Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“The scope of the LANL SWEIS is of great national importance because it examines the environmental impacts associated with expanded plutonium pit production and cleanup at LANL,” the letter reads. “The 2008 LANL SWEIS is a formidable document, with 1942 pages, not counting the 144-page Summary and the 1207-page Comment Response Document. That’s a total of 3293 pages. This gives an idea of the amount of information analyses that are involved in preparing informed public scoping comments and why more time is needed.”
“This is too little too late, a sham process designed to circumvent citizen enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “The key sentence in NNSA’s announcement is that absent any new decisions in the site-wide environmental impact statement, the agency will continue to implement decisions it previously made behind closed doors.”
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The U.S. government is planning to review the environmental effects of operations at one of the nation’s prominent nuclear weapons laboratories, but its notice issued Friday leaves out federal goals to ramp up production of plutonium cores used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said the review — being done to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act — will look at the potential environmental effects of alternatives for operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the next 15 years.
That work includes preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons worldwide and other projects related to national security and global stability, the notice said.
Watchdog groups contend that regardless of the review, the NNSA will march ahead with its production plans for plutonium cores at Los Alamos.
“This is in direct contradiction to the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement that federal agencies take a ‘hard look’ at proposed actions before implementation,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement.
So much happened after 2008 that called for a new, thorough impact study years ago, including the plutonium facility’s “checkered nuclear safety history” that led to its major operations shutting down for more than three years, Coghlan said.
A new sitewide analysis now, Coghlan said, will merely “rubber stamp the billions of taxpayers’ dollars being sunk into a predetermined decision to expand plutonium pit production at LANL.”
The National Nuclear Security Administration announced it will conduct a sitewide environmental review at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Associated Press File Photo
The federal agency that oversees nuclear weapons will conduct a sitewide environmental review at Los Alamos National Laboratory, breaking from its past resistance to performing fresh analysis of potential impacts as the lab gears up to make 30 nuclear warhead triggers a year.
The National Nuclear Security Administration announced in the Federal Register on Friday it would do a sitewide analysis of the lab under the National Environmental Protection Act and would take public comment until Oct. 3.
It’s the first time the agency, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, has done a new sitewide environmental impact statement in 14 years.
“Jay [Coghlan] of Nukewatch, invited by Wester to answer an audience question about Ukraine having lost deterrence when it returned Soviet nuclear weapons to Moscow, emphasized that Ukraine never had the controls to actually detonate nuclear weapons stored on its territory. Coughlin then echoed Beamont’s statement, saying ‘we can flip the argument, say that Russia is shielded from consequences because it has nuclear weapons. Deterrence has been flipped on its head.’”
At least 100 parishioners must have been in attendance at the special mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi on Aug. 9, 2022. The Tuesday afternoon service at the historically significant church did not fall under the usual schedule. Following an afternoon rich in monsoon thunderstorms, the clouds cleared, allowing regulars and visitors alike to file in to hear what, exactly, the Archbishop of the Santa Fe Archdiocese had to say about the work of peace.
“In the way that 109 East Palace was the gateway to nuclear oblivion, I hope that the Basilica of St. Francis can be the gateway to global nuclear disarmament,” John C. Wester, Archbishop of Santa Fe, told the assembled crowd.
The address is instantly familiar to those fluent in nuclear history and opaque outside of it. During the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop and build an Atomic Bomb in Los Alamos, 109 East Palace was the place to arrive before being covertly whisked away to the lab.
WHEN IT COMES TO SALVATION FROM NUCLEAR OBLIVION, FAITH IN THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE TASK ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH. THERE MUST BE WORK THAT MAKES IT REAL.
It was the work of Los Alamos that made Aug. 9 the occasion for a mass dedicated to nuclear disarmament. On Aug. 9, 1945, the US dropped Fat Man, the second and so far last nuclear weapon used in war. The bomb fell on Nagasaki, a Japanese city hastily added to the targeting list. While the bombardier claims the clouds parted for visual confirmation of the target, it is at least equally plausible the crew decided to drop the bomb by radar targeting and fly back to base, instead of ditching it in the ocean or crashing on the way back.
“A watchdog group criticized the Energy Department for choosing a subsidiary of Bechtel, a former partner in the consortium Los Alamos National Security LLC, which improperly packaged the waste drum that exploded at WIPP.”
“A private corporation that blew up WIPP operations in 2014 is now going to run WIPP?” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “Does the Department of Energy have no contractor accountability?”
The U.S. Energy Department has awarded a $3 billion, 10-year contract to a Bechtel subsidiary to replace the current operator running the underground waste storage site in Carlsbad.
Tularosa Basin Range Services, based in Reston, Va., will take over daily operations of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant after Nuclear Waste Partnership’s contract expires Sept. 30.
Tularosa Basin, whose parent company is Chicago-based Bechtel National Inc., was among five bidders, and its proposal was “determined to be the best value to the government,” the Energy Department said in a statement.
The contract will go for four years, with six one-year extensions available after that.
Reinhard Knerr, left, chats with Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico during the one-on-one discussion at the WIPP information meeting Thursday in Santa Fe. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
“…At this point Commissioners Hansen and Hamilton walked out as well as several others. Greenwald and others placed green tape over the mouths.
As attendees were being invited to the one-on-one conversations in the next room, Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan shouted out that the 2014 incident that shut down WIPP had not been mentioned during the presentation or the fact that half of WIPP is being reserved for waste from pit production. He called the meeting a “scam”.”
The Los Alamos Reporter sat down late Thursday afternoon with Reinhard Knerr, Manager of the Department of Energy’s Site Office in Carlsbad for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Knerr and Sean Dunagan, President and Project Manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership, LLC, the contractor operating WIPP, were in Santa Fe to provide an update on WIPP at a public forum Thursday evening.
As background, WIPP is the nation’s only deep geologic repository. Located about 26 miles east of Carlsbad , the facility is authorized to accept transuranic (“TRU”) radioactive waste that is placed 2,150 feet below the surface in a mined bedded salt formation where eight excavated “panels” each with seven rooms and two access drifts lie within some 120 acres that have been mined for the facility. Four shafts connect the underground with the surface and a fifth shaft provides most of the air intake for the underground.
An improperly sealed ventilation system caused the radioactive leak that contaminated three workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility earlier this year, requiring one of the employees to receive medical treatment, according to an internal federal review.
“‘They’re behind the curve all the time,’ said Scott Kovac, the research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.”
The review says a misaligned connection between the ventilation system and a glove box allowed radioactive material to slip through a degraded gasket on an old, unused port, raising questions about how these systems are inspected and maintained.
A glove box is a sealed compartment with attached gloves that workers use to handle radioactive material. The review looked at a January radioactive release involving a glove box, one of several such incidents reported in recent years.
In its newly posted June 3 report, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board gave a summary of the review conducted by the National Nuclear Security Administration, a U.S. Energy Department branch.
The nuclear security agency’s review made 27 conclusions and listed nine areas that need correction to prevent similar incidents.
“But critics of the lab’s push to bolster its nuclear weapons program think the pit production goals are unrealistic and unnecessary.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, asked Mason in a written question why the lab is spending tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars ramping up production of the bomb cores when a 2006 study found the ones left over from the Cold War are good for 85 years.”
Nuclear deterrence is in full display during the war in Ukraine, with Russia and the U.S. threatening each other with nuclear destruction to force restraint, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s director said during an online forum Tuesday.
Russia has told the U.S. and its allies not to intervene militarily in Ukraine, and President Joe Biden has made clear that Russia must not encroach one inch upon a NATO country — and both sides raise the specter of nuclear attacks if these boundaries are breached, lab Director Thom Mason said.
“The role that deterrence is playing in the Ukraine right now, really from both the U.S. and Russian side, is to attempt to limit that conflict,” Mason said.
Mason is a staunch advocate of the lab producing 30 plutonium warhead triggers, also known as pits, per year by 2026, saying it’s necessary to modernize the nuclear arsenal and maintain a strong deterrent against adversaries like Russia.
“I’m old enough that I grew up as a child during the Cold War. We are back in a new nuclear arms race,” said Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “And I personally find it disgusting that, some 30 years after the end of the Cold War, we’re back in, arguably, an even more dangerous nuclear arms race than the first one.”
“We’re in a very deep and dangerous situation,” he said. “We’re back in a dangerous nuclear arms race in which the United States plays a very prominent role, not by any means the only role but a very prominent role.”–
Fueled by nuclear weapons programs and new plutonium pits, the Department of Energy’s budget for New Mexico is primed to explode.
The department is planning to spend a whopping $9.4 billion in New Mexico in the 2023 fiscal year, surpassing the entire state government budget.
The figure is included in the president’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. The DOE spent about $8 billion in New Mexico in the 2022 fiscal year.
More than $1.3 billion will be spent on five nuclear weapons programs being worked on by the state’s national laboratories, according to DOE budget documents. That includes the initial phases of the first new nuclear warhead in more than 30 years.
The Energy Department oversees Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Calsbad. Both Sandia and Los Alamos play a role in designing and developing nuclear weapons.
But a watchdog group argued Los Alamos lab adopting a higher radiation limit for workers than other labs is to create more leeway when it ramps up plutonium pit production.
“The collective worker doses would probably go up once they start actual manufacturing,” said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
…
Jay Coghlan, the executive director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the agency in charge of nuclear security is pushing the lab to crank up pit production, yet it won’t install what’s known as a “safety class active confinement system” that would prevent a heavy radioactive release during an earthquake, catastrophic fire or a serious accident.
“This is a longstanding recommendation that Los Alamos [lab] and NNSA refuse to honor while continually downplaying the risk of expanded pit production,” Coghlan said.
Los Alamos National Laboratory allows workers to have a higher yearly radiation exposure than other national labs do and has not followed a longtime recommendation by safety officials to install a ventilation system in its plutonium facility they say would better protect workers and the public during a serious radioactive breach, according to a recent government watchdog’s recent report.
The report, some critics contend [see our quotes above], is of concern as the lab pursues production of nuclear bomb cores, or pits, at nearly triple the yearly amount it has ever made before.
Apr 20, 2022 — The Los Alamos lab’s plutonium modernization funding would climb to $1.56 billion from this year’s $1 billion, more than a 50 percent increase.
I have high praise for Nuclear Watch New Mexico for its persistent efforts and the recent successful settlement in protecting the environment and health of …
Jay Coghlan, Executive Director @ Nuclear Watch New Mexico, on tactical nukes in the Ukraine war with Russia, the deterrent factor, PIT manufacturing in Los Alamos and other related topics.
Federal officials would agree only to study the possibility of clearing out waste from the Area G pit and wouldn’t commit to following through, said Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch’s executive director.
“Ideally, the transuranic nuclear waste would go to WIPP, and the low-level radioactive materials would be buried in a landfill with liners and a leachate collection system. Capping and covering the on-site pit is problematic because it’s unlined and could allow toxins to leach into the groundwater,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory will do extensive waste cleanup and fix a long-broken monitoring system for polluted runoff to comply with a settlement of a watchdog’s lawsuit.
The U.S. Department of Energy and Nuclear Watch New Mexico agreed to a settlement in federal court last week to end six years of litigation for what the watchdog group characterized as neglect of longtime issues.
between the Department of Energy and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, or NukeWatch, over a 2016 federal-state consent decree covering legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos…”
“The federal ruling in favor of Nuclear Watch New Mexico brings to a close six years of litigation against the U.S. Department of Energy for what the group has characterized as the agency’s neglect of longtime issues.”
Mar. 23—Los Alamos National Laboratory must do extensive waste cleanup and site remediation and fix a long-broken monitoring system for polluted runoff to comply with a federal court’s ruling on a watchdog’s lawsuit.
Joel and Xubi discuss the Ukrainian invasion in the context of nuclear weapons and strategic resource acquisition with Jay Coghan from NukeWatch.
Newly minted LOE co-host Jay Coghlan from NukeWatch New Mexico, and Santa Fe County Commissioner Anna Hansen join Xubi to discuss the environmental issues posed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s decades of environmental disregard for the sacred land of the San Ildefonso Pueblo and the watersheds down hill in the Rio Grande valley.
Commissioner Hansen also serves as the chair of The Buckman Direct Diversion Board which safeguards the water source for much of Santa Fe County and the City of Santa Fe Water Utility.
Recently the State Environment Department has sued the National Laboratory for a “continuing pattern of delay and noncompliance” with the cleanup of hazardous legacy waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory, posing a health risk to people in surrounding communities.
“Nuclear watchdog groups have been critical of the Energy Department. They have raised concerns about the repository’s future, citing the increase in defense-related waste that will need to be disposed of when production of key components for the country’s nuclear arsenal ramps up at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.”
ALBUQUERQUE — There’s no way of knowing if cost increases and missed construction deadlines will continue at the only United States underground nuclear waste repository, according to a federal watchdog report made public Tuesday.
The Government Accountability Office outlined the concerns in its report, noting the U.S. Energy Department is not required to develop a corrective action plan for addressing the root causes of challenges at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico.
A multimillion-dollar project is underway at the underground facility to install a new ventilation system so full operations can resume after a radiation leak in 2014 forced the repository’s closure for nearly three years.
A lab critic said he’s concerned about flaws in worker training, equipment and inspections contributing to glove box breaches as LANL gears up for producing plutonium pits for warhead triggers.
“As things ramp up, we’re bound to have more problems,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Los Alamos National Laboratory had two additional breaches of a sealed radioactive-material compartment known as a glove box in January, bringing the total to three in one month, according to a government watchdog.
One employee damaged a glove attached to a sealed compartment while manually moving material with a disabled trolley through the enclosed space, causing enough of a release to contaminate the person’s face.
The cursory assessment winds up glossing over what could be serious problems at the lab, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“The full evaluation reports used to be available; there’s nothing classified about them,” Coghlan said. “It’s all paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer has a right to know how the contractor has performed.”
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is releasing only cursory, three-page summaries of its FY 2021 Performance Evaluation Reports (PERs), which provide scant information and essentially whitewash contractor performance. For context, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and cleanup programs have been on the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List for project and contractor mismanagement for 27 consecutive years. In 2012 Nuclear Watch New Mexico sued to obtain the full and complete Performance Evaluation Reports, after which NNSA caved in and immediately provided them. However, that unfortunately resulted in no legal settlement requiring annual releases of the full and complete PERs, and now the agency is back to suppressing information on contractor performance paid for by the American taxpayer.
During the question and answer period, Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan said he was fascinated to hear that there was some funding allocated for a new SWEIS.
“Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Savannah River Site Watch subsequently in June 2021 filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina’s Aiken Division against the DOE and NNSA, arguing pit production should not be increased until site-wide environmental analysis were conducted at both facilities.”
A main component of nuclear weapons was poised to be built in New Mexico after federal regulators granted approval for a plan to prepare Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for the work.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, announced earlier this month it approved LANL’s project to prepare areas of the lab to be used in plutonium pit production – a project known as LAP4.
Watchdog groups said it wasn’t until the state sued in February 2021 that the DOE proposed boosting the cleanup budget at the lab by about one-third. Before that, budgets were flat, with the groups arguing that DOE had no incentive to seek more funding.
“The conclusion I draw from it is the New Mexico Environment Department gets a lot more from the stick than it does from the carrot with respect to making the laboratory and DOE truly committed to comprehensive cleanup,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
While officials at one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories promise to focus on cleaning up Cold War-era contamination, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates it could be 2036 before the cleanup is complete at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Watchdog groups said it wasn’t until the state sued in February 2021 that the DOE proposed boosting the cleanup budget at the lab by about one-third. Before that budgets were flat, with the groups arguing that DOE had no incentive to seek more funding.
“The conclusion I draw from it is the New Mexico Environment Department gets a lot more from the stick than it does from the carrot with respect to making the laboratory and DOE truly committed to comprehensive cleanup,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
FILE – This undated file photo shows the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. Officials at one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories are reiterating their promise to focus on cleaning up Cold War-era contamination left behind by decades of research and bomb-making. But New Mexico environment officials and watchdog groups remain concerned about the pace and the likelihood that the federal government has significantly understated its environmental liability at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (The Albuquerque Journal via AP, File)
Officials at one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories are reiterating their promise to focus on cleaning up Cold War-era contamination left by decades of research and bomb-making.
During the question and answer period, Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan said he was fascinated to hear that there was some funding allocated for a new SWEIS.
“The last one was in 2008 and it’s woefully outdated. To use NEPA terms, there’s a lot of new information and changed circumstances,” Coghlan said. “…And then there’s the question of the scope of the SWEIS, which would by definition imply it should consider the full range of issues from cleanup to pit production. What more can be said about a new SWEIS for Los Alamos (National Laboratory) at this time because as far as I know this is the first inkling whatsoever that there will be a new one?”
While officials at one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories promise to focus on cleaning up Cold War-era contamination, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates it could be 2036 before the cleanup is complete at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
An anti-nuclear group said this type of plutonium isn’t explosive but would be hazardous to breathe.
It’s possible the lab made this type of plutonium a lesser priority while ramping up pit production, and now it plans to take big shipments, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“That’s a huge amount to accept,” Kovac said. “Now they’re asking NNSA to say that’s OK.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory wants to store high heat-emitting plutonium in uncertified containers that, if breached in a fire or an earthquake, could expose workers and the public to hazardous doses of radiation, according to a government watchdog’s report.
The lab’s primary contractor seeks a waiver to store large quantities of plutonium-238 in unapproved containers that, if breached, could expose the public to 83 to 378 rem, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a December report, referring to the unit that measures radiation absorbed in living tissue.
The estimated cost of handling the degrading radioactive material is rising steadily — $512 billion at last count.
“DoE is now running up against a statutory limit for how much waste it can store in the space, so it recently changed its counting method to exclude space between storage drums as storage space. New Mexico regulators approved the change but the matter is being challenged in court.
“They knocked a third out of it with a slight of hand. That will allow them a lot more waste,” complains Scott Kovac, operations & research director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM), a local anti-nuclear group.”
A nuclear watchdog group wants a state commission to nullify its decision on a permit for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s radioactive liquid waste treatment facility, arguing the panel’s former chairwoman backed a ruling favorable to the lab while she sought a job with the federal agency that oversees it.
At least 125 people were present for the service, many bearing roses in honor of the Lady of Guadalupe. Among them was Karen Weber, who said it’s “highly symbolic” for Wester to speak out on the “abolishment of nuclear weapons.”
Looking up at the sky as a young teen one day in Daly City, Calif., Archbishop John C. Wester had one thought as he saw military planes overheard.
Were they ours, or were they Russian planes?
The year was 1962, perhaps the first time nuclear war between the two superpowers seemed likely to erupt as the Cuban Missile Crisis played out and students were taught to prepare for an atomic attack by diving under their desks at schools.
“I don’t think going under our desks was very helpful,” Wester said Sunday in Santa Fe, moments before issuing a call for the world to rid itself its nuclear weapons.
Now, some 60 years later, he said he wants to do more to end the threat of an atomic war. Wester spoke and prayed during a 30-minute prayer service and ceremony at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe before he unveiled a sign bearing an image of Pope Francis and a quote uttered by the pope in Hiroshima in 2020: “The possession of nuclear arms is immoral.”
Wester said “our archdiocese needs to be facilitating, encouraging an ongoing conversation” about nuclear disarmament.
“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.”
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.
“We know it’s part of expanding WIPP. We know what DOE is doing but DOE doesn’t want to publicly admit it and the Environment Department doesn’t want to deal with it…The reason the laws have always put limits on WIPP is that the DOE was supposed to be finding locations for other repositories. There is no other repository and that’s why they don’t want to have a limit on what goes into WIPP.” — Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at Southwest Research and Information Center.
A New Mexico appellate judge upheld a change in how the volume of nuclear waste disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is counted, shifting the repository from being halfway to capacity to only a third full.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy requested to modify its WIPP operating permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) to change how it counts the amount of waste toward the facility’s statutory limit of 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic (TRU) waste consisting of clothing materials and equipment irradiated during nuclear activities.
The change was intended to count the inner volume of the waste as opposed to the volume of the outer containers that hold the waste, seeking to avoid counting air between the waste itself and waste drums.
NMED approved the permit modification request (PMR) in 2019, but Albuquerque-based watchdog groups Southwest Research and Information Center and Nuclear Watch New Mexico immediately appealed the decision.
Federal agencies continue to reject a full review of the public safety and environmental risks of producing nuclear bomb cores at multiple DOE sites.
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented, “The government has yet to explain to American taxpayers why it will spend more than $50 billion to build new plutonium pit bomb cores for new-design nuclear weapons when we already have thousands of existing pits proven to be reliable for a century or more. This has nothing to do with maintaining the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile and everything to do with building up a new nuclear arms race that will threaten the entire world.”
AIKEN, SOUTH CAROLINA — Public interest groups shot back at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s attempt to suppress a lawsuit seeking a comprehensive environmental review of the agencies’ plans to produce large quantities of nuclear bomb cores, or plutonium pits, at DOE sites in New Mexico and South Carolina.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico, along with other watchdog groups, has announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its expanded production of plutonium cores for the U.S. nuclear weapons “modernization” plans. There has been inadequate environmental review by federal agencies, who have failed to detail potential impacts of the projects around communities in New Mexico and South Carolina.
The lawsuit was filed against the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration demanding the federal agency that oversees U.S. nuclear research and bombmaking must “take a legally required ‘hard look’ at impacts on local communities and possible alternatives before expanding manufacturing of the plutonium cores used to trigger nuclear weapons.”
The push from U.S. officials to “modernize” the country’s nuclear arsenal cites only general global security concerns that do not justify the science and brand new, untested technology that will be necessary to the task. citing global security concerns. Although “most of the plutonium cores currently in the stockpile date back to the 1970s and 1980s,” scientific experts estimate that plutonium pits will last 100 years or more., and on warhead type, the best estimate of minimum pit life is 85–100 years.minimum.
Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina face enormous (and, frankly, unrealistic) deadlines to produce a massive number of plutonium cores in coming years – 50 or more cores at South Carolina and 30 or more at Los Alamos National Lab. The Savannah River Site location now has estimated costs up to $11.1 billion, with a completion date ranging from 2032 to 2035. The U.S. doesn’t need the new plutonium cores with the taxpayer bearing the burden for the expense of lagging deadlines and bloated budgets.
“The watchdog groups said Tuesday that the agency took a piecemeal approach to decide on locating the production at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site, where nearby communities are already underrepresented and underserved.”
Tom Clements of Savannah River Site Watch said the South Carolina location was picked for political reasons following the failure of a facility designed to convert weapons-grade plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. As the Savannah River Site has never served as a storage or production site for the pits in its history, establishing pit construction there would be “a daunting technical challenge that has not been properly reviewed,” Clements said.
With very real, current threats the U.S. is facing right now, we don’t need another Rocky Flats situation in New Mexico or South Carolina where a $7 billion, yearslong cleanup is required after the facilities fail due to leaks, fires and environmental violations, doing irreparable damage to the earth and placing communities there in unequivocal peril.
The government never finished this mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This site would be converted to a pit plutonium factory, according to plans. COURTESY HIGH FLYER
Four public interest groups said Tuesday they are suing the federal government, seeking to stop construction of multi-billion dollar nuclear production factories in South Carolina and New Mexico that would make components for new atomic weapons.
Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri Valley CARES and the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition are seeking an extensive study, known as a programmatic environmental impact statement, to weigh the effects of new pit plants on the environment and people who live near them.
Federal officials have sought the new plants to update the nuclear arsenal, a prospect that project boosters say could provide 1,000 jobs at the Savannah River Site, the Aiken area weapons complex where a pit factory would be located.
But critics say the promise of jobs isn’t worth the risk of environmental contamination or the cost, now estimated to be about $15 billion for the two plants.
“That’s good news,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said of the plan to get rid of the 35-year-old facility. “Demolishing that building will save the public costs and reduce risks.”
Coghlan at first said he was “pleasantly surprised” to see such a large increase in the budget for cleanup.
“Perhaps better put, flabbergasted,” he added, noting the $107.5 million increase in spending on the task compared to the current fiscal year.
He also noted that the Trump administration had proposed a $100 million decrease in spending on cleanup a year ago, but Congress ultimately kept cleanup spending at LANL at $226 million.
In a news release, Coghlan praised Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state Environment Secretary James Kenney for suing DOE over a “continuing pattern of delay and noncompliance” with a 2016 consent order that provided benchmarks for cleanup that LANL has failed to meet.
If Savannah River is delayed in reaching its pit-making goal, Los Alamos lab could be pressured to produce more than 30 pits a year.
“All of this may boomerang on Los Alamos lab, which has been incapable of making a pit for the nuclear weapons stockpile since 2011,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Coghlan was referring to a contract in which the lab made 11 pits in one year for Navy missiles a decade ago. That was the lab’s highest pit production, which soon ceased.
Los Alamos National Laboratory would receive about $1 billion for plutonium operations at the heart of its effort to produce 30 nuclear bomb cores by 2026, according to a partial budget the White House released Friday.
The amount would be more than a 20 percent jump from the $837 million being spent this year on the lab’s plutonium work, a clear signal that President Joe Biden will echo his predecessors’ calls to modernize the nuclear stockpile to deter China, Russia, Iran and other adversaries that have growing first-strike abilities.
The lab’s $837 million plutonium budget this year was 2.7 times larger than the prior year’s allocation of $308 million.
The lab’s plutonium funding was part of the draft budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the federal agency in charge of the country’s nuclear weapons program.
The budget also requests $603 million — a 37 percent increase — to move the Savannah River Site in South Carolina toward producing 50 pits a year.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico complained that the RCLC main selling point was to lobby for mission diversification and accelerated cleanup and said he would argue that the Coalition has been a spectacular failure on both counts.
“When the Coalition was founded in 2011, LANL’s nuclear weapons budget was $1.9 billion. A decade later that budget is $2.9 billion and the total spending on core nuclear weapons research and production has risen year after year to where now it’s a full 70 percent of all funding and all of the remaining 30 percent either directly or indirectly supports those nuclear weapons,” Coghlan said.
The next couple of months may determine the demise of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities. The City of Santa Fe opted last month not to approve the RCLC’s amended and restated joint powers agreement which has been hanging out there waiting for the City’s decision since March 2019. The City is slated to decide whether to withdraw completely from the RCLC later this month.
The Taos County Commission is slated to decide Tuesday whether it wishes to continue as a member and Santa Fe County Commissioners have the same decision to make at their May 11 meeting.
Los Alamos County Council is expected to discuss its RCLC status in June which will be the first time the Council will have had an agenda item on the RCLC since it approved the amended JPA in July of 2020. The discussion is at the request of Council Vice Chair James Robinson. Councilor David Izraelevitz, who serves as RCLC treasurer, has been a strong advocate of the RCLC and has recently addressed several meetings of members of the Santa Fe City Council at the behest of Councilor Michael Garcia to encourage them to approve the amended JPA. City of Espanola Mayor Javier Sanchez also attended a Santa Fe City Council meeting to advocate and answer questions.
The water spill should be a reminder that the plutonium facility’s work is done by people, and people make mistakes, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“Pit production will place a real time-pressure crunch on the workers and lead to more accidents,” Kovac said.
“It should lead us to consider the consequences if someone left a plutonium furnace on or something that could endanger the public…these kinds of missteps are likely to increase as the lab ramps up production of plutonium pits used to trigger nuclear warheads. Current plans call for the lab to make 30 of the nuclear bomb cores a year by 2026,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory had two mishaps in one week: a glove box breach that contaminated workers’ protective equipment and a spill of 1,800 gallons of water into a vault corridor after an employee left a valve open.
The incidents were the latest in a series of accidents in recent months at the lab, as reported by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
In the board’s most recent report, an alarm sounded March 29 when a worker tore a protective glove attached to a sealed compartment known as a glove box while handling a piece of plutonium. Continue reading→
“As construction problems mounted, costs rose, and schedules slipped, (and) defendants hid the true status of the project,” the indictment said.
“…Delays and cost overruns — hidden by SCANA officials from the public and state regulators — eventually doomed the effort, making it one of the largest business failures in South Carolina history.”
A mixed oxide fuel factory was under construction at the Savannah River Site for years. But the project has been scrapped and the federal government is looking to convert the site into a plutonium pit factory COURTESY HIGH FLYER
A coalition of environmental groups from the southern and western United States is threatening to sue the federal government over plans for plutonium pit factories in South Carolina and New Mexico that would produce components for additional atomic weapons.
In a letter Tuesday to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a non-profit law firm said the government should prepare an extensive environmental study before deciding to establish pit production factories at the Savannah River Site near Aiken and the Los Alamos site near Santa Fe, N.M.
African American and Native American communities have been hurt by past activities at the nuclear sites, and President Joe Biden’s administration should consider how the production factories would add to that burden, according to the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, a non-profit legal service in South Carolina.
Nine environmental groups, including SRS Watch, the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Tri-Valley Cares of California and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, are among those seeking more study.
The law project’s letter also was sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a division of the energy department.
“The plans of DOE and NNSA to expand this production program will saddle the already-burdened communities represented by these groups with a significant amount of nuclear waste and pollution,’’ the letter from lawyer Leslie Lenhardt said.
Her letter said the pit production efforts are in “complete contravention’’ to an executive order by President Biden that federal agencies weigh the impact their policies and plans have on disadvantaged communities.
“This is more than just chronic behavior — it’s like institutionalized bad management,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Energy and its agency overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons program have serious enough problems with managing contractors and projects — including for nuclear waste cleanup — that they made a government watchdog’s “high-risk” list again this year.
Both the Energy Department and its branch known as the National Nuclear Security Administration have made some progress in how they manage personnel, facilities and waste disposal, but they still are deficient in key areas, the Government Accountability Office said in its biannual high-risk report.
The report lists programs and operations that are high-risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement — and some require an overhaul.
The GAO issues the reports at the start of each new session of Congress. They have led to more than $575 billion in cost benefits to the federal government in the past 15 years, the GAO said.
The lawsuit notes that Nuclear Watch New Mexico previously filed a lawsuit against the DOE over its non-compliance with the 2016 Consent Order.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement that “What New Mexicans really deserve (is) to have needed cleanup drive funding instead of the budget that DOE wants driving cleanup. We strongly salute the Environment Department for taking legal action against DOE’s scheme of expanding dirty nuclear weapons production over cleanup.”
SANTA FE – The state Environment Department has lost patience with the U.S. Department of Energy over what it says is a “continuing pattern of delay and noncompliance” with the cleanup of hazardous legacy waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory, posing a health risk to people in surrounding communities.
After a dispute resolution process broke down, the New Mexico Environment Department late Wednesday filed a civil lawsuit against the DOE in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe. It claims that DOE has failed to meet objectives identified in compliance orders in 2005 and 2016 and has dragged its feet in cleaning up contamination left behind from decades of bomb-making and nuclear research.
It asks that a court-supervised process be conducted to resolve the issues.
“We’re a state agency, and our patience is long,” Environment Secretary James Kenney said in a phone interview. “But our patience runs out quickly when there’s an inability to meet promises.”
Worker moves drums of transuranic (TRU) waste at a staging area. By filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy, state regulators now hope to dissolve the existing consent order regulating waste cleanup at the lab and impose tougher rules for disposing of transuranic waste. Credit: Richard Robinson
State regulators are suing the U.S. Department of Energy for what they say is a failure to adequately clean up legacy waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and they will impose tougher rules for disposing of waste generated at the lab during the Cold War and Manhattan Project.
Critics have bashed the 2016 agreement for waste cleanup — known as a consent order — that was crafted under Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, saying it weakened the original 2005 order by eliminating real deadlines and imposing few penalties for slow or deficient work.
The lawsuit, filed in state District Court, seeks to cancel the consent order, fine the Energy Department about $330,000 for not meeting its cleanup obligations and have the court oversee mediation between the two parties for a new waste agreement.
“Remember that when your congressional members pitch expanding nuclear weapons production as jobs programs; you can respond that they are illegal. Tell them they should show visionary leadership and moral courage by helping to create cleanup and green energy jobs instead.”
Jan. 22 will go down in history as the day when the tide turned against nuclear weapons. That was the day when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons went into effect, signed by 122 countries.
It specifically prohibits nations from developing, testing, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons and assisting others in doing so. It reinforces existing international law obligating all states not to test, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.
What immediate impact will it have here, given that the Los Alamos National Laboratory is the birthplace of nuclear weapons and now sole producer of plutonium pit triggers for the expanding U.S. stockpile? The brutally honest answer is no impact, not immediately.
But think about it. Nuclear weapons are now internationally illegal, just as horrendous chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction have long been. But nuclear weapons are the worst WMDs, potentially killing millions more while causing radioactive fallout and famine-inducing nuclear winter. Ask your New Mexican congressional members to explain why nuclear weapons shouldn’t be internationally banned just like chemical and biological WMDs, all of which cause agonizing, indiscriminate suffering and death.
Jay Coghlan looks back at NukeWatch NM’s first grant from Ploughshares Fund
Jay Coghlan is the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit organization founded by veteran anti-nuclear activists that seeks to promote environmental protection at regional nuclear facilities, mission diversification away from nuclear weapons programs, greater accountability and cleanup in the nationwide nuclear weapons complex, and consistent US leadership toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Jay recently spoke with us on the initial reaction to Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s first grant from Ploughshares Fund, what has been accomplished since their founding in 1999, and what you can do to continue supporting their work.
What was your reaction when you found out that you received a grant?
My initial reaction was one of surprise. I was new to the work and didn’t really feel worthy of the trust that the Ploughshares Fund had put into me. Second came elation and the realization that I could become professional and devote myself to the work full time, which I view as a necessity. Third came a strong feeling of gratitude, which I still feel 28 years later because of Ploughshares’ incredible steadfast and consistent support.
What are you most proud of accomplishing in this field?
What I am most proud of is having played a central role in beating back four attempts by the US government to expand plutonium pit bomb core production, which has been the chokepoint of resumed US industrial-scale nuclear weapons production ever since a 1989 FBI raid investigating environmental crimes shut down the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. This work included convincing a New Mexico senator to require an independent plutonium pit lifetime study which in 2006 concluded that pits last at least a century. Shortly thereafter, in conjunction with a restrained budget environment, Congress deleted funding for a new-design nuclear weapon called the Reliable Replacement Warhead and related expanded plutonium pit production.
“Many of the drums probably have sat around for years, even decades, posing a hazard,” said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“It’s an example of nuclear weapons work getting the priority while cleanup and waste management is on the back burner,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking steps to address the hazards posed by dozens of barrels of radioactive waste mixed with incompatible chemicals, which have the potential to explode.
The lab is responding to a report in October by the federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which found the lab had failed to analyze chemicals present in hundreds of containers of transuranic nuclear waste.
Incompatible chemicals could blend together and cause a container to burst, releasing a high level of radiation that would threaten workers and the public, the report said.
Federal installations face a deadline of making 80 cores per year by 2030, with the first 30 due in five years.
“Nuclear Watch New Mexico, South Carolina-based SRS Watch and California-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Department last week, asking that a rigorous environmental review be done before production is ramped up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina.”
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Watchdog groups want the Biden administration to reconsider a decision by a U.S. agency not to conduct a more extensive environmental review related to production of the plutonium cores used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The renewed request comes as federal installations in New Mexico and South Carolina face a deadline of making 80 cores per year by 2030, with the first 30 due in five years.
With jobs and billions of dollars in spending at stake, the effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress over the years, especially among New Mexico Democrats whose districts stand to benefit from the economic windfall. The Biden administration has taken swift action to reverse some policies by the Trump administration but has yet to say whether it plans to push ahead with making more plutonium cores. It does say that work is being reviewed.
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico: “It’s important to note that no future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, it is for speculative new nuclear weapons designs that can’t be tested because of the international testing moratorium, or perhaps worse yet may prompt the U.S. back into testing, after which surely other nations would follow.”
FEBRUARY 11, 2021
Public interest organizations sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requesting that it address calls for a rigorous environmental review of plans to expand production of nuclear bomb cores at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina.
The non-profit groups—Nuclear Watch New Mexico, SRS Watch and Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment—have previously submitted a number of formal comments and information related to the environmental and public health risks associated with a significant expansion of plutonium “pit” production at the two DOE sites. Continue reading→
Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley CARES recently retained the Environmental Law Project. They say pit factories are expensive, unnecessary, needlessly threaten the environment, and could leave unused plutonium stranded permanently in places like SRS.
The government never finished this mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This site would be converted to a pit plutonium factory, according to plans. COURTESY HIGH FLYER
A South Carolina legal service has joined the fight against an atomic weapons components factory at the Savannah River Site, raising the possibility that environmental groups will sue the federal government to stop the effort.
The South Carolina Environmental Law Project, a non-profit service with an extensive record of arguing cases in court, outlined concerns about the factory in a letter this week to the U.S. Department of Energy. The letter called the proposed factory risky and in need of further study.
At issue is a proposal to build a nuclear weapons pit plant that would use plutonium, a deadly long-lived radioactive material, at the Savannah River Site.
The pit factory would produce potentially thousands of jobs, but is drawing opposition from environmental groups in South Carolina, New Mexico and California.
Elizabeth West, center, of Santa Fe stands next to a ‘Leaving New Mexico’ sign at the corner of West Alameda and Guadalupe streets Friday while protesting Los Alamos National Laboratory’s new offices in downtown Santa Fe.
“The threat and risks of wildfire to the lab and northern New Mexico will continue to increase because of climate warming, drought and expanded nuclear weapons production,” said Jay Coghlan, director of the group Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Los Alamos National Laboratory as seen from across the Omega Bridge
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — (AP) — One of the nation’s premier nuclear laboratories isn’t taking the necessary precautions to guard against wildfires, according to an audit by the U.S. Energy Department’s inspector general.
The report comes as wildfire risks intensify across the drought-stricken U.S. West. Climatologists and environmentalists have been warning about worsening conditions across the region, particularly in New Mexico, which is home to Los Alamos National Laboratory and where summer rains failed to materialize last year and winter precipitation has been spotty at best.
The birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos has experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and damage from major wildfires over the last two decades. That includes a blaze in 2000 that forced the lab to close for about two weeks, ruined scientific projects, destroyed a portion of the town and threatened tens of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste stored on lab property.
Watchdog groups say the federal government needs to take note of the latest findings and conduct a comprehensive review before the lab ramps up production of key plutonium parts used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the lab puts most of its attention on producing nuclear weapons and neglects forest maintenance, despite the disastrous Cerro Grande Fire that destroyed dozens of its structures.
The Las Conchas Fire crests over the hills above Los Alamos National Laboratory in June 2011. Sparked by a downed power line, the blaze burned more than 150,000 acres and destroyed dozens of homes. A report by the U.S. Energy Department’s inspector general said the lab’s failure to manage forestland is increasing the potential for ‘devastating wildfires.’ CREDIT Brian Klieson.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has failed to properly manage its forested lands, increasing the threat of wildfires at lab sites and surrounding areas, according to a federal watchdog.
The lab has not thinned trees or cleared forest debris from many wooded areas, nor has it maintained service roads to ensure safe passage for firefighting crews, boosting the potential for “devastating wildfires” like the Cerro Grande Fire in 2000, the U.S. Energy Department’s inspector general said in a strongly worded report released this week.
The report criticized the lab’s main contractor, Triad National Security LLC, for not following fire management plans and not documenting required yearly activities to prepare for and prevent possible wildfires at the site.
“Our review found that activities designed to reduce the impact from wildland fire had not been fully implemented at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in accordance with site plans,” the report said.
The report comes as the federal Drought Monitor shows Los Alamos County and much of the state as being in exceptional drought — the most severe condition — which raises the risks of wildfires.
Jay Coghlan from Nukewatch New Mexico and Kevin Kamps from Beyond Nuclear discuss the recent developments in Nuclear Weapons proliferation and the new international ban on nuclear weapons.
Living on the Edge also cover reasons why nuclear power may not be the low carbon panacea for transitioning our electric grid that is so widely promoted these days.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the breach escalates the threat of a nuclear catastrophe.
“On top of the dangers that we faced during the Cold War this now raises new concerns…Could our nuclear weapons be hacked for malicious reasons? Could hackers take advantage of LANL’s checkered safety and security record and cause a life threatening event in our own backyard? The sooner we all have a nuclear weapons-free world the safer we will be.”
SANTA FE — While the Department of Energy says that a cyberoffensive was limited to business networks, concerns remain about the depth of the breach and what threat it could still pose to national security and New Mexico’s two national laboratories.
Some news reports say that the hacks are believed to have been instigated by a Russian intelligence agency. The reports specifically mention Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, where atomic research is conducted, as being vulnerable.
In addition, Los Alamos National Laboratory is tasked with producing plutonium pits, the triggering device in nuclear warheads.
Earlier this week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning, calling the hack “a grave risk” to federal, state, local and tribal governments, as well as critical infrastructure entities and private sector businesses. It said the suspected breach dates back to at least March.
In a joint statement this week, CISA, the FBI and the director of national intelligence said they were working together to investigate a “significant ongoing cybersecurity campaign.”\
“N3B is going after the low-hanging fruit, cleaning up less than 2,000 cubic yards of contaminated dirt,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “Let’s hear their plan for cleaning up 200,000 cubic yards of radioactive and toxic wastes at Area G that are already migrating towards our irreplaceable groundwater.”
Coghlan said N3B touting this small part of the cleanup smacks of “propaganda to promote the toothless 2016 consent order.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s contractor in charge of cleaning up radioactive waste produced during the Cold War and Manhattan Project has completed its first goal under a 2016 agreement.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT, also known as N3B, finished removing almost 1,800 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris from four sites in Upper Mortandad, Upper Cañada del Buey and Threemile canyons.
Crews packed and shipped the material to a disposal site in Clive, Utah.
“Cleanup of these sites ultimately protects human health by eliminating the likelihood that contamination will reach the water system through stormwater runoff,” Brenda Bowlby, head of N3B’s soil remediation program, said in a statement.
Removing the toxic debris also protects the area’s wildlife, she added.
The cleanup project was one of 17 that N3B aims to do under the 2016 agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the state Environment Department.
“The Southwest Research and Information Center is among those opposing the project. The group filed legal challenges, saying environmental officials ignored existing regulations, past agency practices and case law when giving temporary approval for contractors to begin working.”
ALBUQUERQUE — Crews working at the U.S. government’s underground nuclear waste repository in southeastern New Mexico are starting a new phase of a contentious project to dig a utility shaft that officials say will increase ventilation at the site where workers entomb the radioactive remnants of decades of bomb-making.
Officials at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad said this week the $75 million project is a top priority and that work will be done around the clock five days a week, with an additional shift on Saturdays. The shaft will eventually span more than four-tenths of a mile and connect to an underground system of passageways.
As long as nuclear deterrence, that most unmeasured of strategies, remains, it keeps company with the prospect of use and annihilation. Coghlan, in his rebuke to the editors also penned in the Albuquerque Journal, gave an acid summation: “the US arsenal has always been about nuclear war fighting, starting with the simple fact that we were the first to use it.” Only “sheer luck has kept us from nuclear catastrophe.”
In what is a turn-up for the books, a senior voice of the Catholic Church made something of an impression this month that did not incite scandal, hot rage, or the commencement of an investigation. It did, however, agitate a few editors. Archbishop John C. Wester of San Fe, in speaking at the online Hiroshima Day vigil, had put up his hand to defy the validity and morality of nuclear weapons and, along with them, the idea of nuclear deterrence. One of the organisers of the event, the veteran peace activist Rev. John Dear, claimed it had “never happened before.”
Dear had a point. There has been a shift within Catholic ranks urged along by Pope Francis on that most fatuous of strategic doctrines, nuclear deterrence. Before the United Nations General Assembly in June 1982, Pope John Paul II chose to argue that nuclear “‘deterrence’ based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable.”
“That $2 trillion nuclear weapons modernization will do nothing to protect us against the global pandemic impacting Americans now. Further, the Sandia and Los Alamos labs may actually degrade national security with planned new nuclear weapons designs that can’t be tested because of the global testing moratorium. Or worse yet, this may prompt the U.S. back into testing, throwing more gas on the fire of the new nuclear arms race.”
In response to (the Aug. 13) editorial “Archbishop’s nuclear weapons view needs a homily on reality,” I was one of the speakers at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, organized by Fr. John Dear, at which Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester eloquently spoke. The editorial declared “neither Wester nor Dear appear to accept the premise there is any deterrent benefit to the nuclear arsenal.”
To the contrary, the Journal perpetuates the delusion that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is just for deterrence, a premise fed to American taxpayers since the beginning of the Cold War. Instead, the U.S. arsenal has always been about nuclear warfighting, starting with the simple fact that we were the first to use it. This continues to this day, as the Pentagon made clear in a 2013 nuclear policy declaration: “The new guidance requires the United States to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries. The new guidance does not rely on a ‘counter-value’ or ‘minimum deterrence’ strategy.”
The U.S. bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Although nuclear weapons haven’t been used in combat since, they continue to proliferate across the globe. This week, two activists from New Mexico explain the lesser known costs of the production of nuclear weapons… Continue reading→
“Given LANL’s history it’s imperative that monitoring be robustly resumed,” Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in an email. “This is after all the Lab that use to claim that groundwater contamination was impossible… Now we know of heavy chromium and high explosives groundwater contamination which are a harbinger for more contaminants to come.”
Technical Area 54 is a part of Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) in New Mexico – the same Los Alamos that was home to the Manhattan Project, which ushered in the atomic era and today continues to produce radioactive triggers for nuclear weapons.
Within TA-54 is what’s called Area G. The federal government refers to as LANL’s “legacy waste management area.” For over 60 years, it has been a storage, processing and disposal area for different kinds of radioactive and otherwise toxic waste from LANL.
“Mishandled glove boxes are a long-standing problem at the lab, but having 15 workers possibly exposed to radiation because of one breach is a high number and could become more common as the plutonium plant ramps up production of nuclear cores.” — Scott Kovac, research and operations director for nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“The 15 workers is just an example of things to come,” Kovac said.
A view inside a conveyer alley where contained handling takes place. The gloveboxes are designed for preparing uranium and plutonium carbide compounds. publicintegrity.org
Fifteen employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium plant were tested for radiation exposure after a “glove box” breach in June contaminated the work area.
Air monitors sounded an alarm at the facility when an operator accidentally ripped off the protective gloves attached to a sealed compartment for handling plutonium after the worker weighed and packaged plutonium-238 oxide powder.
The breach contaminated the worker’s protective clothing, hair and skin, and caused enough potential airborne exposure that other workers had to be tested for radiation, according to a report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
A regional watchdog group said the development plans raise some questions.
Technical Area 36, where commercial, industrial and mixed-use complexes would be built, was formerly a firing site where uranium and beryllium were detonated in the open air, so some toxic residue probably lingers there, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The site is also across the road from Area G, where massive legacy waste produced during the Cold War is buried, Kovac said. Contaminants might be released into the air if that old disposal area is excavated, he said.
Los Alamos County has requested 3,074 acres in White Rock from the U.S. Energy Department to use for building housing, stores, offices, light industry and schools. Santa Fe New Mexican Courtesy photo
Within this clifftop community once shrouded from public view, it’s no secret the Los Alamos area needs more housing for future growth.
Los Alamos County wants the U.S. Energy Department to turn over 3,074 acres in White Rock at no cost so the land can be used for housing, stores, offices, light industry and schools.
To sweeten the deal, Los Alamos National Laboratory would be able to use part of the land to build support facilities and enhance its operations.
Less than 10 percent of the land would be developed — 275 acres — and most of that would be for housing, which county officials say is needed for the lab’s growing workforce and to create a larger pool of workers living in town to help attract other businesses.
A letter from 120 activist groups and citizens has prompted the state’s two U.S. senators to ask federal agencies to give the public more time to comment on possible environmental effects of pit production at Los Alamos Laboratory.
U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich wrote to the National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday, urging it to extend the public comment period to June 19 on its environmental study of the lab’s future production.
They cited challenges presented by the COVID-19 crisis and referred to a letter they received from activists who had asked for the June 19 extension.
“We continue to believe that providing the public ample opportunity to comment on environmental documents … provides an invaluable source of expertise to NNSA’s decision-makers, enhances transparency and ensures accountability,” the senators wrote. “We respectfully request that you give careful consideration to extending the public comment period.”
“We’re pleased that LANL is postponing its massive radioactive tritium release, particularly as northern New Mexico braces for the coronavirus pandemic,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement. “But postponement is not the answer. Since tritium decays so rapidly into harmless helium the lab should simply sit on it instead of putting the population at risk.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory will indefinitely postpone a project that would release radioactive vapors into the atmosphere because staff needed for the task are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The lab had planned to ventilate four containers of tritium-tainted waste April 17 to relieve built-up radioactive hydrogen in the barrels’ headspace to prevent them from rupturing while they are being handled or shipped. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the application for the radioactive release last year.
“The coronavirus pandemic demonstrates why we should get cleanup done once and for all,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “What we do as humans ebbs and flows with history, but the radioactive and toxic wastes that we leave behind last longer than our recorded history. We should be acting now.”
The U.S. government’s efforts to clean up Cold War-era waste from nuclear research and bomb making at federal sites around the country has lumbered along for decades, often at a pace that watchdogs and other critics say threatens public health and the environment.
Now, fallout from the global coronavirus pandemic is resulting in more challenges as the nation’s only underground repository for nuclear waste finished ramping down operations Wednesday to keep workers safe.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will release radioactive vapors into the atmosphere to ventilate several barrels of tritium-tainted waste generated during the Cold War. Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in the 1990s he won a lawsuit against the Energy Department for falsely claiming a building’s “shielding factor” kept radioactive emissions within federal limits.
“The undocumented assertion in the application that half of the tritium could remain behind in equipment should be viewed with suspicion,” Coghlan said.
The lab informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month that it would ventilate four waste containers, beginning April 17, to relieve the built-up, radioactive hydrogen in the barrels’ headspace to prevent them from rupturing while they’re being handled. The EPA approved the application for the radioactive release last year.
“NNSA [is] shutting the public out, while steamrolling exorbitantly expensive expanded pit production…There is a clear need for a nationwide programmatic environmental impact statement to justify or not expanded plutonium pit production, followed by a new site-wide environmental impact statement for Los Alamos,” — Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch New Mexico
SANTA FE – The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday released its draft Supplement Analysis to the 2008 Site-wide Environmental Impact Statement for Los Alamos National Laboratory, concluding that it doesn’t have to complete an environmental impact statement.
The study examines whether environmental analysis for expanded plutonium pit production at LANL should be required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Based on analysis in this SA, NNSA preliminarily concludes that no further National Environmental Policy Act documentation for LANL at a site-specific level is required,” the document says. “However, NNSA will consider comments on this draft SA prior to publishing a final SA.”
Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose central bargain was that non-nuclear weapons states forswore acquiring them in exchange for which nuclear weapons states promised to enter into serious negotiations leading to their elimination. Those negotiations have never happened.
The Trump Administration has marked the occasion by finally releasing the detailed fiscal year 2021 Congressional Budget Request for the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration. The NNSA’s program for new and upgraded nuclear weapons gets a $3 billion-plus mark-up to $15.6 billion, slated to jump to $17 billion annually by 2025.
“To have a 46 percent cut in Los Alamos cleanup is stunning,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “We’ve got nuclear weapons on steroids and cleanup is the poor stepchild subject to the whims of DOE.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s long-term environmental cleanup program would be cut by $100 million under the U.S. Energy Department’s proposed budget for 2021.
The agency’s preliminary “budget in brief” shows a proposed 46 percent reduction in funding for the lab’s environmental management, which handles cleanup of legacy waste generated before 1999, including during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
A mile-long, highly toxic chromium plume under the Sandia and Mortandad canyons and the massive radioactive waste buried in Area G are the results of shoddy disposal that occurred around the lab before environmental regulations were enacted in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the Energy Department wants to increase spending by 25 percent on nuclear weapons to help meet the Trump administration’s goal of having LANL and Savannah River Site in South Carolina produce a combined 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030.
Production of new plutonium pits for unneeded nuclear weapons poses risk of new nuclear arms race.
COLUMBIA, SC, USA, January 9, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ — The Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that it is proceeding with aggressive plans to expand the production of plutonium pits without required nation-wide “programmatic” public review. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch and Tri-Valley CAREs assert this is in violation of the legal requirements of both the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and a 1998 court order that stipulates that DOE must prepare a “programmatic environmental impact statement” (PEIS) when it plans to produce more than 80 pits per year. Plutonium pits are the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons.
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico concluded, “We need to find smart ways to face the world’s renewed nuclear arms race. Unnecessary expanded production of questionable plutonium bomb cores is not the way to do it. Instead of aggressively modifying nuclear weapons the U.S. should carefully preserve its existing, reliable, extensively tested nuclear weapons stockpile while working toward a future world free of them. It’s that kind of analysis and consideration of credible alternatives that the National Environmental Policy Act should give Americans instead of the nuclear weaponeers rubber stamping their self-interested agenda of nukes forever at the taxpayer’s expense.”
U.S. plutonium bomb core production ended in 1989 when the FBI raided the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver while investigating environmental crimes. In 1997, DOE relocated pit production to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico after completing the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. Production was capped at 20 pits per year.
Nuclear watchdogs, government accountability advocates and other critics argue that the decision skirts requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and a decades-old court order that included a mandate for an environmental review when the federal government embarked on plans to boost production to more than 80 of the nuclear cores a year.
FILE – This undated file aerial view shows the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. The agency that oversees the United States’ nuclear arsenal says it doesn’t need to do any broad environmental reviews of a proposal that calls for ramping up production of plutonium triggers at federal installations in New Mexico and South Carolina. The National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, released a supplemental analysis related to the project, saying the determination was made after reviewing extensive documentation and public comments that were received last year. (The Albuquerque Journal via AP, File)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The agency that oversees the United States’ nuclear arsenal says it doesn’t need to do any broad environmental reviews of a proposal that calls for ramping up production of plutonium triggers at federal installations in New Mexico and South Carolina.
The National Nuclear Security Administration on Wednesday released a supplemental analysis related to the project, saying the determination was made after reviewing extensive documentation and public comments that were received last year.
A key component of every nuclear weapon, most of the plutonium cores in the stockpile were produced in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the nuclear agency.
Nuclear watchdogs, government accountability advocates and other critics argue that the decision skirts requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and a decades-old court order that included a mandate for an environmental review when the federal government embarked on plans to boost production to more than 80 of the nuclear cores a year.
“NNSA’s refusal to complete programmatic environmental review before plunging ahead with plans to more than quadruple the production authorization for plutonium bomb cores flies in the face of our country’s foundational environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, and a standing federal court order mandating that the government conduct such a review,” – Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CARES
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review calls for Los Alamos National Lab to produce 30 plutonium pit cores annually by 2030.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will not complete a programmatic study for environmental impacts of increased plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and one other lab located in South Carolina. The decision to not do so drew criticism from Nuclear Watch NM and other groups, who argue such assessments are required by law under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and an existing court order.
Plutonium pits are the radioactive cores of nuclear warheads where the chemical reactions occur that cause the warhead to detonate. The U.S. made thousands of cores during the Cold War, but pit production has all but stopped in the last thirty years.
Now, the federal government is getting ready to ramp up pit production in order to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and “assure the nation has a safe, secure and credible deterrent,” said Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the Department of Energy Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and the NNSA Administrator, in a statement. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review calls for at least 80 plutonium pits to be produced per year by 2030, with a target of 30 pits produced annually at LANL and 50 pits produced annually at Savannah River Site.
The state of New Mexico is reconsidering its 2016 pact with the U.S. Department of Energy on how to regulate the cleanup of decades-old hazardous waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Ryan Flynn, who became the state’s environment secretary in 2013, granted the lab 150 deadline extensions during his tenure, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Shortly after Flynn announced in 2016 that the consent order was being revised, the Energy Department reduced its top-range estimate for the long-term cleanup to $3.8 billion and said it would need at least 20 years to complete it, Coghlan said.
That reduced the yearly cleanup projection to $150 million from the earlier $250 million estimate, Coghlan said.
“It’s no coincidence that a mere few months after the 2016 consent order came out, DOE low-balled its life-cycle estimate,” he said.
The administration of Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wants to revisit the agreement — known as a consent order — that the state Environment Department crafted under Republican Gov. Susana Martinez to replace a more stringent 2005 version that expired at the end of 2015.
The public will have a chance to air views about the current consent order and suggest changes at a meeting Thursday at the University of New Mexico’s Los Alamos campus. The meeting is being held in response to people expressing concerns about the consent order to state regulators and legislative leaders, said Maddy Hayden, a spokeswoman for the Environment Department.
The contractor that’s been in charge of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s operations for the past year lost track of 250 barrels of waste, while the company heading the legacy cleanup mislabeled and improperly stored waste containers and took months to remedy some infractions, according to the state’s yearly report on hazardous waste permit violations.
Triad National Security LLC, a consortium of nonprofits that runs the lab’s daily operations, had 19 violations of its permit from the New Mexico Environment Department. Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, also known as N3B, which is managing a 10-year cleanup of waste generated at the lab, was cited 29 times. Triad’s most notable violation was shipping 250 barrels of mostly mixed waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad without tracking them. Mixed waste contains low-level radioactive waste and other hazardous materials. Inspectors found records still listed the waste at the national lab.
Mislabeled containers should be taken seriously because they can cause incidents if the contents aren’t identified, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Lab personnel didn’t update the shipping data because they were waiting for WIPP to acknowledge it had received the waste, lab spokesman Matt Nerzig said in an emailed statement. “There was no risk to public health or safety and the inventory is now correct,” Nerzig said, adding that shipping updates now will be done when waste leaves the lab. But a watchdog group said failing to track such a high volume of waste is an egregious error that falls in line with the lab’s long history of serious missteps.
“The fact that LANL has mischaracterized, misplaced, mis-inventoried — or whatever — 250 barrels of waste is pretty astounding,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “We see mistakes being made by a new contractor. So definitely, all of this is cause for concern.”
WIPP was supposed to be a demonstration for the rest of the country, a test run to see if nuclear waste could be buried in salt elsewhere.
It wasn’t meant to become America’s only nuclear repository — “pilot plant” is in its name — yet today it is. Watchdogs say that by tabbing thousands of barrels of plutonium waste to go there, the Energy Department is reshaping the mine’s purpose. “What it (implies) is quite dramatic expansion of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or another WIPP-like facility somewhere,” said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, another watchdog group.
In the time it will take for South Carolina’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to decay, you could repeat most of human history, starting back in the Stone Age.
By the time its byproducts lose the explosive potential to be used in nuclear weapons, some 7 billion years will have passed. The Earth itself will have doubled in age, and then some.
The U.S. government will officially decide in the next few years where the plutonium — the metal used to trigger nuclear weapons — will spend that eternity. And when it does, it will ask another part of the country to bear a profound burden: to house thousands of barrels filled with scraps of the Cold War and America’s nuclear arms race, a legacy that may well outlast our civilization.
That question will soon be posed to New Mexico, where the U.S. Department of Energy has excavated cavernous vaults deep below the ruddy soil in the state’s southeastern corner. The government hopes it will eventually hold tons of plutonium it has decided it no longer needs — enough to build a few thousand bombs the size of the one dropped over Nagasaki, Japan.
If New Mexico says yes, the Energy Department will bury some 20,000 steel drums deep underground there, in a ribbon of salt as thick as Charleston’s Ashley River is wide.
If it says yes, trucks will carry the plutonium load by load down Interstate 20 for the next three decades, and workers will lower it almost half a mile underground, where it will await its final fate: the mine’s slow collapse, and salt entombing it forever.
11/18/19 KTRC Talk Radio 1260 AM: Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Jon Lipsky, the FBI agent who led the 1989 raid investigating environmental crimes that shut down the Rocky Flats Nuclear Bomb Plant
Lipsky, who continues to raise concerns about the dangers of radioactive waste, will be in Santa Fe this week for a workshop organized by Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which opposes plans for pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The event takes place Wednesday evening at the Mud Gallery.
SANTA FE, N.M. — Jon Lipsky is a retired federal agent with a big notch in his gun – he shut down a plant that made plutonium parts for the nation’s nuclear weapons.In an episode unique in American history, in June 1989, Lipsky led the FBI’s raid on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, where the cores of nuclear weapons, or “pits,” were made.
Later, under a plea deal, the private contractor that ran the plant for the DOE – Rockwell International – admitted to four felonies and six misdemeanors for environmental crimes and paid the government $18.5 million. The plant formally closed forever in 1992 and the U.S. has made only a handful of pits since.
Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Jon Lipsky, the FBI agent who led the 1989 raid investigating environmental crimes that shut down the Rocky Flats Nuclear Bomb Plant join Xubi to talk about Nuclear weapons, Nuclear clean up and Pit production plans at LANL.
A plutonium pit design from the 1940s. This photo was taken during a recreation of a criticality issue that occurred in 1946 at LANL. Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos has a starring role in a shift to U.S. nuclear policy that’s two presidential terms in the making. Nuclear watchdog groups in the state are concerned about the United States’ evolving nuclear agenda, which will see a sharp increase in plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
LANL recently released its $13 billion expansion proposal to accommodate increased pit production at the site. The expansion is part of a wider push across the country to ramp up the nuclear warhead manufacturing machine, according to Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.
Plutonium pits are central to nuclear weaponry. They are the “radioactive cores of modern nuclear weapons,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. He added that the pits themselves are weapons. “It was essentially a plutonium pit that destroyed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945,”
The ramp-up is years in the making, as successive presidential administrations have struggled to address how to modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile. But nuclear watchdog groups worry an increase in pit production at LANL would have negative repercussions for the region. While LANL has touted the proposed economic benefits of its proposal for the area, activists argue the dangers outweigh the benefits.
SANTA FE – The U.S. Department of Energy’s inspector general is recommending that the department seek reimbursement of up to $300,000 in DOE grant money that a coalition of local governments in northern New Mexico didn’t properly account for.
“The Regional Coalition is not the effective lobbying voice for clean up at Los Alamos that it claims to be because it condones DOE’s plan for cleanup on the cheap that will leave the vast majority of radioactive and toxic wastes permanently buried above our groundwater,” Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said in a statement Wednesday.
“The Coalition should pay the American taxpayer back whatever it improperly spent and be terminated. At a minimum, the City of Santa Fe should resign from this discredited Coalition right away.”
“With this ruling,” said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, “the NNSA no longer has any legal authority to continue construction of the Uranium Processing Facility bomb plant.” The decision may have ramifications for NNSA’s efforts to expand nuclear weapons production at other sites, too, including Los Alamos, NM and Savannah River, SC, where environmental scoping is underway for a new plutonium pit manufacturing facility.
Jay Coghlan, director of co-plaintiff Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said, “Uranium and plutonium components manufacturing are two sides of the same coin of expanding nuclear weapons production in an escalating arms race. The Department of Energy should take this court ruling against its Uranium Processing Facility as a warning that it must also comply with National Environmental Policy Act requirements while ill-advisably expanding the production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons.”
The ruling also points out the crucial role the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board plays in monitoring safety issues at Y-12 and across the nuclear weapons complex. Since last year, the Department of Energy has worked to reduce the Safety Board’s access to some nuclear facilities, even issuing a revised Order to limit the information available to the Board and the restricting who the Board can and cannot speak to directly.
Structural steel installation is under way on the eastern half of the Main Process Building of the Uranium Processing Facility, the Y-12 National Security Complex said Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2019. (Photo courtesy CNS Y-12)
A federal judge in Knoxville on Tuesday said a critical decision made in 2016 for enriched uranium operations at the Y-12 National Security Complex, including for the $6.5 billion Uranium Processing Facility, violated a national environmental law, and she ordered the decision vacated, or set aside.
The UPF is already under construction, and Wedenesday morning, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees work at Y-12, said construction will continue.
The 104-page opinion and order was filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday by Chief U.S. District Judge Pamela L. Reeves.
The lawsuit was initially filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, but it was later moved to the Eastern District of Tennessee. Besides OREPA, the plaintiffs included two other public interest organizations—Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and Natural Resources Defense Council of Washington, D.C.— and several individual plaintiffs.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — Nuclear watchdog groups say they will sue if the U.S. government doesn’t conduct a nationwide programmatic environmental review of its plans to expand production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch and Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment threatened legal action in a letter sent this week to officials.
In June, the National Nuclear Security Administration said it would prepare an environmental impact statement on pit-making at Savannah River. A less extensive review was planned for Los Alamos.
Public Interest Groups Challenge Plans to Fabricate Plutonium Pits for New, Unjustified Nuclear Weapons, at Los Alamos National Lab and Savannah River Site
Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch New Mexico director, noted, “The Los Alamos Lab has a long track record of nuclear safety problems that must be resolved before expanded plutonium pit production is even considered. The government’s claimed need for expanded production needs to be critically examined in a new nation-wide supplemental PEIS for its environmental impacts, costs and potentially adverse national security impacts. Following that, given the massive changes proposed for LANL due to expanded pit production, NNSA will also have to prepare a new site-specific site-wide environmental impact statement for the Los Alamos Lab.”
Workers excavating a waste disposal site | US Department of Energy
Even as Los Alamos National Labs takes on contracts for new weapons manufacturing, taxpayers are still shelling out for the clean-up costs of contamination dating back to atomic bomb testing. The latest clean-up proposals will likely leave hazardous waste in the ground. Meanwhile, recent hazardous waste safety violations add up to $222,313.
N3B, the company recently contracted by the US Department of Energy to complete a significant portion of remaining clean-up efforts, gave a presentation to the public at the Santa Fe Community College on Thursday as part of a series of community meetings leading up to the process to decide methods for cleaning up several contaminated legacy waste sites around LANL.
…The DOE reported that 1,168 of 2,123 contaminated sites have been cleaned and 10,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste removed, leaving 5,000 cubic meters of waste remaining identified for clean-up. Yet, according to watchdog group Nuke Watch New Mexico, that leaves 690,251 cubic meters of waste permanently buried on-sight in unlined pits and shafts above a regional aquifer that provides drinking water for San Ildefonso Pueblo, Española, Los Alamos and Santa Fe, among other communities. Nuke Watch Executive Director Jay Coghlan tells SFR this number is from analysis of publicly available LANL documents and data.
What these staged events fail to disclose, contradicting repeated claims of transparency, is that decisions already have been made behind closed doors to remove only approximately 6,500 cubic yards of radioactive and toxic waste, while leaving 30 times as much buried permanently above our groundwater aquifer.
LANL used to claim that groundwater contamination from lab operations was impossible. Today, we sadly know otherwise. Deep groundwater under LANL is contaminated with chromium, perchlorate and high explosives. Intermediate aquifers linked to deep groundwater are contaminated with tritium, industrial solvents, heavy metals and plutonium.
The sick people who prevent gun control and support AK47s are the same people who support the building and maintenance of nuclear weapons, which put millions of people at risk from some unimaginable massacre to come.
The sickness of our widespread gun violence epidemic is connected to the sickness of the nuclear weapons industry, and the numbness and despair among us allow these lethal epidemics to threaten us all. (Photo: John Dear)
REFLECTING ON THE 74th ANNIVERSARY OF HIROSHIMA
This week, we drove back up the remote New Mexico mountains to the “atomic city” for our annual peace vigil, sit in and rally. This was our 16th year in a row.
Jay Coghlan of NukeWatch New Mexico talked about the seriousness and stupidity of the Trump Administration’s decision last week to pull out of the Arms Control Treaty, a decision that has gotten lost in all the other bad news (see: www.nukewatch.org). Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety New Mexico spoke of the latest shenanigans by the Labs, to bypass the legal oversight of its water purification system so that plutonium contaminated water can continue to poison the land (see: www.nuclearactive.org). Alicia from NukeWatch explained the latest progress with the U.N. treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons, organized by the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winning group, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (see: www.icanw.org).
A coalition of nuclear watchers and environmental groups on Friday night hosted a public forum in Aiken, during which speakers unloaded on the proposed plutonium pit production expansion at both the Savannah River Site and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Savannah River Site Watch Director Tom Clements speaks earlier this month at the plutonium pit production forum, flanked by a large photo of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility/Staff photo by Colin Demarest
The get-together, held at the Aiken Municipal Building, was largely led by Savannah River Site Watch Director Tom Clements. He was backed by Marylia Kelley, the executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, and Jay Coghlan, who leads Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Together, the three called into question the actual need for more pits, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s ability to successfully produce them, and discussed at length the environmental and health repercussions that could come with such a significant weapons-oriented mission.
The public “can be effective against bad Department of Energy ideas, like the pit production one,” Clements said early in his remarks.
At least 80 pits per year are needed by 2030, according to the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, a leading nuclear policy document. Plutonium pits are nuclear weapon cores.
“They keep coming up with this number, 80, and I don’t know where they get this from,” Clements said. “They haven’t justified it.”
AIKEN — A forum regarding the Department of Energy’s proposed expanded production of plutonium pits at Savannah River Site was held Friday evening.
About 70 people gathered in the auditorium of the Aiken Municipal Building to hear speakers present information against the proposal and encourage the public to write to their representatives in opposition to the plan.
The Department of Energy has proposed to use the former Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility as the location to produce about 50 plutonium pits per year. The pits make up the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons.
Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch, said the department should not rush into a new project at the MOX plant, which was shut down in October.
Anti-nuclear activists fired away Friday at what they said is a dangerous and little known plan to produce deadly atomic weapons components at the Savannah River Site near Aiken.
The federal government has proposed a multibillion dollar plutonium pit factory that could create as many as 1,700 jobs as part of an effort to make fresh plutonium, a major ingredient in atomic bombs.
But the proposed factory is raising concerns about its risk to the environment and the public, in addition to how it would be viewed by world leaders. Critics say the government may use the pits in a new type of nuclear weapon, instead of only replenishing the existing stockpile with fresh plutonium.
Savannah River Site Watch, a nuclear watchdog organization that tracks SRS, held a public meeting Friday night in Aiken County to brief people on the government’s plan at SRS, a 310-square-mile complex in western South Carolina.
“We don’t think people are really aware of what is going on: that this new mission is fraught with risk that could come to SRS,’’ Savannah River Site Watch director Tom Clements told The State.
Nuclear watchdog groups from New Mexico and California joined SRS Watch for the forum in Aiken County, where many SRS workers live. Before the Friday meeting, the groups held a news conference to voice concerns. The U.S. Department of Energy plans its own forum on the proposal June 27 in North Augusta.
Anti-nuclear activists fired away Friday at what they said is a dangerous and little known plan to produce deadly atomic weapons components at the Savannah River Site near Aiken.
A mixed oxide fuel factory was under construction at the Savannah River Site for years. But the project has been scrapped and the federal government is looking to convert the site into a plutonium pit factory COURTESY HIGH FLYER
The federal government has proposed a multibillion dollar plutonium pit factory that could create as many as 1,700 jobs as part of an effort to make fresh plutonium, a major ingredient in atomic bombs.
Pro-nuclear groups say the pit plant is a good replacement for the mixed oxide fuel facility, commonly known as MOX. Not only will it provide jobs, but it will help keep the United States safe, they say.
Clements and Jay Coghlan, who directs Nuclear Watch New Mexico, don’t see it that way.
“It will be a great waste of taxpayer’s money,’’ Coghlan said. “There also is a long history of chronic safety problems and environmental or waste problems associated with pit production.’’
The proposed factory is raising concerns about its risk to the environment and the public, in addition to how it would be viewed by world leaders. Critics say the government may use the pits in a new type of nuclear weapon, instead of only replenishing the existing stockpile with fresh plutonium.
A $1B building at Los Alamos National Laboratory was found to have a carbon steel valves that can’t handle liquid radioactive waste, according to a report by inspectors for the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. (Associated Press)
SANTA FE – A building at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a price pegged at more than $1 billion apparently has some bad plumbing.
A federal safety oversight board recently reported that the operations staff at the Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building found a leak in the building’s radioactive liquid waste system.
Lab watchdogs have labeled RLUOB, which got the green light for construction in 2011, as the most expensive building in New Mexico. The lab’s website says it’s part of a capital project to replace aging Cold War-era facilities.
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a frequent LANL critic who called attention to the recent safety board report, said the plumbing problem is symptomatic of the lab’s history of safety issues, which has included using the wrong kind of cat litter as a desiccant when packing a radioactive waste drum. A reaction in the drum caused it to breach in 2014 and contaminate the nation’s nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad.
“Remember, this is the gang that couldn’t get it straight between organic and inorganic cat litter, sending a radioactive waste drum that ruptured and closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for three years, costing the American taxpayer three billion dollars to reopen,” Coghlan said in a statement. “Now we learn that they don’t know elementary plumbing for liquid radioactive wastes lines, and we’re supposed to trust them while they unjustifiably expand plutonium pit production?”
LANL is in the process of ramping up for a congressional mandate to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s weapons complex, for production of “pits,” the plutonium cores of nuclear weapons as part of a huge plan to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Face-to-face mediation is expected in June between public interest groups and the New Mexico Environment Department over changes to the way waste volume is calculated underground at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
The New Mexico Court of Appeals often encourages mediation in cases involving state agencies in hopes parties can bridge their differences outside the courtroom, officials say.
A lawsuit filed in January by Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), which challenged a change to the state hazardous waste permit for WIPP, has been stayed pending the talks.
New Mexico Court of Appeals Judge Linda Vanzi issued the stay May 2 and called for the parties to file a status report on the mediation by July 31.
The mediation itself should occur in late June, SRIC Administrator Don Hancock said by email.
Then-state Environment Department Secretary Butch Tongate in December authorized a permit modification allowing DOE to stop counting empty spaces between container drums as transuranic waste. The order adopted the findings of state hearing officer, who recommended waste volume counted against the disposal cap set by the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act should cover only the actual waste inside containers.
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said the report “makes clear that DOE is blowing smoke when it says that it will produce 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030 for new unneeded nuclear weapons. … They need to slow down, do it right and for sure do it safely. Above all the feds must concretely demonstrate a real need for expanded pit production before they fleece the American taxpayer of tens of billions of dollars.”
SANTA FE – A recent study casts serious doubts on the potential success of any of the options considered by the U.S. Department of Energy for meeting mandates on the manufacture of plutonium cores for nuclear weapons – most of them involving Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The congressionally funded study also says that it would be “very high risk” to try to meet the nation’s ambitious goals for making bomb “pits” by installing more equipment and adding an extra work shift for a production “surge” at LANL’s existing plutonium facility, an idea that has been discussed.
Some of the risks cited in the report include whether there is the ability to stage, store and ship waste, and “the transport/transfer complexity of radioactive material.”
The study goes further and questions the overall plan to ramp up U.S. pit production, which is estimated to cost $14 billion to $28 billion, saying that “eventual success of the strategy to reconstitute plutonium pit production is far from certain.” Continue reading→
“Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said the change should not have been approved without an explanation from the DOE about how to address lost space after a contamination incident in 2014 that led to a three-year closure of the facility.”
Two advocacy groups in New Mexico filed a legal appeal Thursday seeking to undo a New Mexico Environment Department order that allows the Energy Department to change the way it records underground transuranic waste volume at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.
The Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) and Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) filed their notice of appeal in the New Mexico Court of Appeals to block the modification to WIPP’s state hazardous waste permit.
While it technically takes effect this month, as a practical matter the new counting system won’t be instituted right away because DOE has not drafted its policy on implementation, said SRIC Administrator Don Hancock by email.
A Dec. 21 order from then-state Environment Department Secretary Butch Tongate authorized DOE to stop recording empty spaces between container drums as waste. The order adopted the findings of state Hearing Officer Max Shepherd, who recommended waste volume counted against the disposal cap set by the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act should cover only the actual waste inside containers.
“The modification is contrary to federal law, changes 20 years of practice in the WIPP Permit and operations, ignores the record in the proceeding including testimony in three days of hearings, and violates the New Mexico-DOE Consultation and Cooperation Agreement,” Hancock said in a press release.
He called on New Mexico’s new governor and environment chief not to back the change in court, but rather overturn it. Given the official implementation date is Jan. 20, any administrative delay or rejection would happen soon, he added.
Nuclear watchdog organizations filed an appeal Thursday of a state Environment Department-approved permit change they say could allow for 30 percent more nuclear waste to be held at a Southern New Mexico storage site.
The request for a New Mexico Court of Appeals review of the agency’s decision in December, which alters procedures for measuring the volume of waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, was filed on behalf of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Southwest Research and Information Center.
The groups allege the permit change violates federal law by allowing plant managers to recalculate the amount of nuclear waste buried underground at WIPP without going through Congress.
The move subtly sidesteps nuclear waste limits outlined under the 1992 Land Withdrawal Act, the groups say.
“Rather than pursuing the permit modification, the Department of Energy should comply with the legal capacity limit and begin a public process to explain what additional waste it wants to bring to WIPP and how it intends to address the loss of disposal space that cannot be used because of the significant underground contamination,” said Scott Kovac, operations and research director of NukeWatch.
Two advocacy groups in New Mexico filed a legal appeal Thursday seeking to undo a New Mexico Environment Department order that allows the Energy Department to change the way it records underground transuranic waste volume at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.
The Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) and Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) filed their notice of appeal in the New Mexico Court of Appeals to block the modification to WIPP’s state hazardous waste permit.
While it technically takes effect this month, as a practical matter the new counting system won’t be instituted right away because DOE has not drafted its policy on implementation, said SRIC Administrator Don Hancock by email.
A Dec. 21 order from then-state Environment Department Secretary Butch Tongate authorized DOE to stop recording empty spaces between container drums as waste. The order adopted the findings of state Hearing Officer Max Shepherd, who recommended waste volume counted against the disposal cap set by the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act should cover only the actual waste inside containers.
Watchdog groups from across the nuclear weapons complex are pushing back against a new Department of Energy order that severely constrains the oversight capacity of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board [DNFSB] at an August 28 hearing in Washington, DC.
The 2016 suit by Nuclear Watch New Mexico alleges DOE and the contractor — Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS) — owe hundreds of …
NukeWatch Media and Public Appearances through August 2018 2018
Daily Bruin, July 1, 2018
UC retains management of Los Alamos nuclear laboratory with new contract https://dailybruin.com/2018/07/01/uc-retains-management-of-los-alamos-nuclear-laboratory- with-new-contract/
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an organization that promotes accountability at nuclear weapon facilities, said in a statement he thinks the UC went forward with its bid with new partners to improve its reputation after the safety lapses of the past several years.
Bloomberg BNA, June 21, 2018
Los Alamos Lab Contract Centers on Improving Worker Safety https://www.bna.com/los-alamos-lab-n73014476701/
” Anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico fought to have the environmental management contract separate from the lab management contract, Scott Kovac, operations and research director, told Bloomberg Environment. Groups also said the number of parties involved in managing the lab could make accountability more difficult.
“We’re going to be focused on who’s running the lab and who are they responsible to,” Kovac said.”
The Nation, June 21, 2018
Nuclear Weapons Pose the Ultimate Threat to Mankind https://www.thenation.com/article/nuclear-weapons-pose-ultimate-threat-mankind/
The current global dynamics of fear, dysfunctional governments, and capitalism run amok are helping to drive the nuclear-arms race. But long-standing groups like Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley Cares, located near nuclear labs and production facilities, are mobilizing with a new intensity against the restarting of industrial-scale plutonium-pit manufacturing.
POGO, June 13, 2018:
Nonprofit group wins LANL contract
"The latest plan would see part of this mission moved across the country to the partially constructed MOX facility at the Savannah River Site. Producing plutonium pits at the site would be a completely new mission for Savannah River and would ultimately cost almost $10 billion more than the agency’s alternative plan to expand plutonium production capacity at Los Alamos, according to new documents obtained by Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Savannah River Site Watch.
"Producing plutonium pits at the site would be a completely new mission for Savannah River and would ultimately cost almost $10 billion more than the agency’s alternative plan to expand plutonium production capacity at Los Alamos, according to new documents obtained by Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Savannah River Site Watch.
"In a letter to the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee last month, the Project On Government Oversight was joined by Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Savannah River Site Watch in requesting justification for this expanded capacity. NNSA has
over 14,000 plutonium cores already constructed and in storage, many of them specifically designated for potential reuse in new nuclear weapons as part of a "strategic reserve." -Lydia Dennett, POGO investigator See her full report at POGO)
Albuquerque Journal, June 8, 2018:
Nonprofit group wins LANL contract
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said UC 'basically ditched Bechtel and went with a safe bet' with new partners after the safety lapses of the past several years."
Augusta Chronicle, May 31, 2018:
Report: MOX project dead, more waste and 1,800 jobs from replacement
"In a nearly 300-page report from the National Nuclear Security Administration released Thursday by Savannah River Site Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, the analysis already assumes Congress will act to terminate the project and it would then be available for conversion to a plutonium pit production facility by 2030.
"But it is also the most expensive of the four alternatives studied in detail, according to a news release from SRS Watch and Nuclear Watch. Upgrading and retrofitting those facilities will cost around $10 billion and run $46 billion over the life cycles of those facilities, costs that are likely to rise with overruns, the groups said. Moreover, each pit produced at the new facility at SRS would generate 10 drums of radioactive waste or 500 drums a year, according to the report.
"SRS Watch and Nuclear Watch said the report fails to make the case for either facility and casts doubt on the need to ramp up production, anyway. There are already 20,000 pits being stored at a DOE plant in Texas and one study estimated each one could last more than a century, the groups said."
Los Alamos Monitor, May 11, 2018:
NNSA announces decision on pit production
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico criticized the decision as purely political. 'First, in Nuclear Watch's view, this decision is in large part a political decision, designed to keep the congressional delegations of both New Mexico and South Carolina happy,' said Nuclear Watch Executive Director Jay Coghlan. 'New Mexico Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich are adamantly against relocating plutonium pit production to South Carolina. On the other hand, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham was keeping the boondoggle Mixed Oxide (MOX) program on life support, and this pit production decision may help to mollify him.'
"Coghlan said he believes the split plan will ultimately fail. 'NNSA has already tried four times to expand plutonium pit production, only to be defeated by citizen opposition and its own cost overruns and incompetence,' Coghlan said. 'But we realize that this fifth attempt is the most serious.
"'However, we remain confident it too will fall apart, because of its enormous financial and environmental costs and the fact that expanded plutonium pit production is simply not needed for the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. We think the American public will reject new-design nuclear weapons, which is what this expanded pit production decision is really all about.'"
Public Integrity, May 11, 2018:
Los Alamos would lose some future bomb production under new Trump administration plan
"Jay Coghlan, who directs the advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico and closely follows weapons activities in the state, questioned why the administration needs to prepare for future production of so many plutonium cores. There is, he said, 'no justification to the American taxpayer why the enormous expense of expanded production is necessary.'"
Public News Service, May 11, 2018:
Los Alamos to Build Part of Next-Gen Nuclear Weapons
"'We're trying to preach restraint to Iran, North Korea, the rest of the world,' says Coghlan, 'and we're going to go on to develop new-design nuclear weapons? That's not practicing what we preach.' Coghlan argues that the NNSA should be required to explain why the increased pit production is needed, and what it will cost taxpayers – in terms of financial, safety and environmental risks. 'We don't need it to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile,' says Coghlan. 'All of this future production is for speculative, new-design nuclear weapons.' Coghlan believes the decision was 'in large part political, designed to keep the congressional delegations of both states happy.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 10, 2018:
Feds: Los Alamos lab to share plutonium work with South Carolina site
"Jay Coghlan, director of Santa Fe-based Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the lack of such a review 'is of questionable legality.' The NNSA also has failed to justify the need to fund such an expensive weapons project, he said. Coghlan called the decision to split the work between the two sites largely a political one, 'designed to keep the congressional delegations of both New Mexico and South Carolina happy.'"
Albuquerque Journal, May 10, 2018:
Feds split 'pit' work between LANL and S.C.
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuke Watch New Mexico, said the NNSA announcement represented 'in large part a political decision, designed to keep the congressional delegations of both New Mexico and South Carolina happy.'
"'There is no explanation why the Department of Defense requires at least 80 pits per year, and no justification to the American taxpayer why the enormous expense of expanded production is necessary,' Coghlan said."
Albuquerque Journal, May 4, 2018:
Assessment of LANL Rad Lab premature, incomplete
This article is an OpEd by Jay Coghlan, essentially the press release of May 2, 2018.
Albuquerque Journal, May 1, 2018:
LANL welcomes new contractor
"'Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a frequent critic of the lab, still has concerns about the transition. 'It's far (from) being a new era when the swamp just gets deeper,' he said in an email to the Journal.
Coghlan said that more than half of Tetra Tech's work cleaning up an old naval base in San Francisco was "downright fraudulent" and cost American taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars to do over. He also said New Mexico's next governor should throw out the "toothless" consent order governing the cleanup negotiated by Gov. Susana Martinez's Environment Department.
"'When those two things are done, then maybe it will be a new era for cleanup at Los Alamos,' he said."
Albuquerque Journal, April 6, 2018:
Bathroom sink overflow raises safety issue at LANL
"'We never dreamed water could leak to the basement from the first (processing) floor, now apparently proved by a bathroom faucet,' said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico."
Los Alamos Monitor, March 2, 2018:
DOE says Tetra Tech will stay in cleanup contract
"The Department of Energy's Environmental Management Office Thursday responded to a nuclear and environmental safety group's request to reconsider the Los Alamos National Laboratory's choice of contractor to clean up waste generated by the laboratory between the Manhattan Project era and 1999.
"A nuclear watchdog group released information earlier this week, raising concerns about allegations of fraud surrounding Tetra Tech prior to the LANL work.
"The watchdog group, Nuclear Watch, pointed to several earlier reports made regarding the company's work.
"'Serious allegations of fraud by Tetra Tech were raised long before the LANL cleanup contract was awarded,' a written statement from Nuclear Watch said. 'The US Navy found that the company had committed widespread radiological data falsification, doctored records and supporting documentation, and covered up fraud at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard cleanup project in San Francisco, CA.'
Nuclear Watch Executive Director Jay Coghlan : "That's B.S. I remind the American taxpayer that DOE cleanup programs have been on the high risk list formulated by the Government Accountability Office since 1990.' Coghlan said. 'DOE is notorious for lack of contractor oversight. It's getting a little bit better... It's getting better because of two things, the security incident at Y-12 and the way Los Alamos closed down WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) for three years with a ruptured drum.'
"Coghlan said subcontractor Tetra Tech should not have been on the main contractor (N3B of Los Alamos) team because of past allegations of abuse and fraud related to other Department of Energy Projects.
"Nuclear Watch Research Director Scott Kovac called Tetra Tech's inclusion in the cleanup contract 'Same old monkeys, different trees.'
"'It took years for the DOE Environmental Management Office in Los Alamos to put a cleanup contract in place. We are seriously disappointed that there are major problems before the contract even starts. This situation shines a light on the cozy DOE contractor system, where every cleanup site has different combinations of the same contractors. Call it different trees, but the same old monkeys, where the real priority is to profit off of taxpayers dollars before a shovel turns over any waste,' Kovac said."
* Update note, April 10, 2018:
New EPA docs: Faked cleanup at Hunters Point Shipyard much worse than Navy estimates- 90 to 97 percent of cleanup at two sites is questionable -"biggest case of eco-fraud in U.S.
history"
Santa Fe New Mexican, March 2, 2018:
Funds for ostrich farm fuel criticism of regional coalition
"'It is, at a minimum, unseemly for the Executive Director of the Regional Coalition, which lobbies for increased LANL funding, to receive funding for her private business from LANS, who runs LANL,' Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a news release. 'Ultimately that funding for her private business comes from the American taxpayer.'
"Romero said Nuclear Watch 'very clearly disagrees with the lab's activities across the board, no matter what they are. 'It's been very clear since their inception that their ultimate mission is to take down the lab,' she said.
"Coghlan laughed at the suggestion. 'Clearly, Ms. Romero is in a pretty vulnerable spot right now,' he said, 'and I think she's saying such things and making such categorical statements against Nuclear Watch New Mexico out of desperation.'
"Coghlan said Nuclear Watch advocates for 'genuine and complete cleanup' of radioactive waste, an effort that he said would not only benefit the environment but create hundreds of well-paying jobs.
"'We are arguing for radical expansion of the cleanup programs at the laboratory, so in that sense, she's completely wrong,' he said. 'Not only that, she is complicit, as is the regional coalition, in condoning the incomplete and fake cleanup that the Los Alamos lab is promoting.' "The friction between Romero and Nuclear Watch is the latest entanglement for Romero, who has come under fire over revelations of taxpayer-funded spending by the coalition that included the purchase of alcohol during expensive restaurant meals and tickets for a professional baseball game in Washington, D.C."
Los Alamos Monitor, March 1, 2018:
New high-level nuclear waste facility application OK'd in southeast NM
Nuclear and environmental groups across the state immediately reacted to the news of Holtec's application acceptance by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for review.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, was critical of proposal. 'This is more evidence of how New Mexico is being targeted to be the country's sacrifice zone for radioactive wastes, but now with the most lethal kind in highly irradiated nuclear reactor rods. This is especially ironic given that our state has never had a commercial nuclear power plant,' Coghlan said. 'The Land of Enchantment! First in nuclear weapons and radioactive wastes, second to last in child well-being.'"
Albuquerque Journal, February 28, 2018:
LANL water cleanup firm facing questions over San Francisco work
"Watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico said in a Wednesday news release that awarding the contract to a group including Tetra Tech raises serious questions about DOE's 'due diligence' in reviewing the performance histories of bidding companies. 'This situation shines a light on the cozy DOE contractor system, where every cleanup site has different combinations of the same contractors,' said NukeWatch research director Scott Kovac."
East Bay Express, February 28, 2018:
The University of Nuclear Bombs
"The University of California is once again bidding to manage Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab
at a time when the threat of nuclear war is rising... Watchdog groups have differing views on the UC's role in overseeing such activities. Scott Kovac, operations and research director of Nuke Watch of New Mexico, opposes the current corporate-university consortium but said he would support a return to management by the UC sans its current corporate partners. "University management makes more sense," he said. "The large corporate entities at Los Alamos have had a lot less transparency than the UC did as sole manager."
Al Jazeera, February 23, 2018:
US takes steps to resume plutonium pit production for nukes
"Nuke Watch New Mexico, a group that tracks environmental and budgetary oversight in US nuclear weapon facilities, questioned the need for the increase in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.The US already has 'some 15,000 pits' stored at a facility in Texas, the group said. "Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan said that instead of an increase, 'there should ... be a programmatic review of all aspects of expanded plutonium pit production, including the inevitable cost overruns, nuclear safety problems, and contamination.'"
Albuquerque Journal, February 22, 2018:
NNSA wants more plutonium in Los Alamos facility
"The release of the document drew immediate fire from watchdogs and critics of the lab. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said recategorizing RLUOB was approved by former Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in 2015 and more than $2 million has been spent since then. Coghlan said conducting an environmental assessment 'after the fact' may violate federal law that requires public comment before commitment of 'irretrievable resources.' "Coghlan added, 'This environmental assessment to raise the plutonium limit in the Rad Lab should not be a standalone document, but instead be part of a far broader programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium pit production.'
"Critics like Coghlan and Mello say no new pits are needed with thousands produced in the past still around and the Navy's distaste for a new kind of warhead for which new pits have been proposed."
Albuquerque Journal, February 11, 2018:
More federal dollars for NM's labs?
"Meanwhile, Jay Coghlan, director of Nuke Watch New Mexico and a close observer of weapons budgets, joins other New Mexico nuclear watchdogs in contending the expensive demand for more plutonium pits and lower-yield nuclear weapons in the Nuclear Posture Review is overkill and a waste of tax dollars.
"Nuke Watch's Coghlan said the Nuclear Posture Review expands the NNSA's demand for plutonium pits from previous benchmarks. He said the 2015 Defense Authorization Act called for production of between 50 and 80 plutonium pits per year. The new posture review says the Defense Department now demands "at least 80 pits per year by 2030."Coghlan said the increase could push at least some production to Savannah River.
"'It's mission creep,' Coghlan said. "'The more pits they want to produce the more it tilts to Savannah River for industrial type production. We're going back to a Cold War configuration.' "Coghlan said he envisions a scenario in which Los Alamos becomes more tilted to 'boutique' research and development of plutonium pits with Savannah River performing more large-scale 'assembly line' pit production."
Santa Fe New Mexican, February 2, 2018:
Nuclear buildup could mean work for labs in N.M.
"What this means for Northern New Mexico is unnecessary plutonium pit production for unneeded new nuclear weapons designs in an escalating arms race," said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. "That will inevitably bring more contamination and safety problems."
Counterpunch, January 25, 2018:
Trump's Draft Nuclear Posture Review Degrades National Security
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico in Santa Fe keeps a critical eye on programs and problems at the state's two nuclear weapons design and production laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia. In the following, Nuclear Watch NM provides expert analysis of the latest official gibberish."
[Here follow the essential points from the NukeWatch press release of January 12, 2018.]
"Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch's Executive Director, concludes with a grim prognosis:
"'The new NPR does not even begin to meet our long-term need to eliminate the one class of weapons of mass destruction that can truly destroy our country. It will instead set back arms control efforts and further hollow out our country by diverting yet more huge sums of money to the usual giant weapons contractors at the expense of public health and education, environmental protection, natural disaster recovery, etc. Under the Trump Administration and this NPR, expect Medicare and social security to be attacked to help pay for a false sense of military superiority.'"
Los Alamos Daily Post, January 18, 2018:
DOE And NMED Hold Joint Meeting On Legacy Waste Clean-Up
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch told EM and NMED officials there has been no opportunity for the public to provide input before decisions are made and that's what counts. "You're standing here telling us what decisions are being made and we're going to have strong disagreement," Coghlan said.
Other concerns also were voiced about the lack of public participation and the opportunity to comment on the clean-up schedule as well as the feeling that the schedule is determined by funding at DOE's discretion rather than the schedule driving the funding as it was under the 2005 Consent Order.
NMED Hazardous Waste Bureau Chief John Kieling was questioned about whether stipulated penalties under the Consent Order would be paid out of clean-up funds or come from elsewhere such as from funds docked from contractors by NNSA. Kieling said he had not talked to the NMED Secretary recently but he believed the stipulated penalties would come from elsewhere.
2017-2013 Media
2017
Albuquerque Journal, December 20, 2017:
LANL work merged in contract
The contract amount comes to "cleanup on the cheap", said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a frequent lab critic. A federal estimate shows that $3.8 billion in cleanup work remains at the lab, even while leaving much of the waste buried, Coghlan said.
Roswell Daily Record, December 9, 2017:
Groups plan opposition to proposed nuclear fuel site
The Saturday meeting in Roswell at North Main hotel brought together college students, faith leaders and people from various New Mexico advocacy groups. Those included the Alliance for Environmental Strategies, the Sierra Club, Beyond Nuclear, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, the Nuclear Issues Study Group, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment. A few representatives from groups in other states also attended.
Santa Fe New Mexican, November 30, 2017:
State auditors challenge WIPP leak settlement
Instead of imposing the fines, however, the state Environment Department issued a new consent order in 2016 that creates milestones for future cleanup but does not stipulate deadlines or penalties.
Jay Coghlan, director of the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico and a critic of the Environment Department, filed a lawsuit against the state for failing to enforce lab cleanup penalties. In a statement this week, he said Tongate "and others are positioning the state's Environment Department to 'cooperate' with the lab. Nuke Watch views it as 'collaborating' with the lab, in the pejorative sense of the word.
"We want a New Mexico Environment Department that actively, aggressively protects the environment," Coghlan said.
Albuquerque Journal, November 28, 2017:
Terry Wallace named new director of Los Alamos lab
A frequent lab critic wasn't impressed with Wallace's history at LANL. "Wallace is a lab good ol' boy," said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. "He'll no doubt have his hand out for more taxpayer dollars for more nuclear weapons programs on the Hill, plus his own pet billion dollar boondoggles."
Santa Fe New Mexican, November 13, 2017:
Letters: A plume of contamination
New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Butch Tongate must have been joking to accuse Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico of personally profiting from Los Alamos National Laboratory's environmental failures ("Full extent of chromium plume unknown," Nov. 3). Tongate must know his $125,000-a-year salary plus benefits dwarfs Coghlan's salary from his struggling nonprofit.
But even more inappropriate is Tongate's description of the New Mexico Environment Department's relationship to LANL as "cooperative." The city water task force I served on in the early 2000s was told by a LANL hydrologist that there was zero possibility of lab contaminants reaching the regional aquifer where a toxic chromium plume is now spreading. Tongate and his staff's job is to protect our health and environment- it is not to cooperate with LANL in cheating us by allowing "cleanup" on the cheap. Fortunately, in 14 months, this administration will end, and with it the coddling of LANL. Then maybe we can see some real, job-producing cleanup at the lab.
- Cathie Sullivan (Ms. Sullivan serves on Nukewatch's steering committee)
Santa Fe New Mexican, November 3, 2017:
Full extent of chromium plume remains unknown
Butch Tongate, secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, told lawmakers the state was working with the lab on the cleanup and would not require it to drill new wells at this time around the area of the plume.
That spurred criticism from Jay Coghlan, director of the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico and a long-standing critic of the lab. Coghlan said he was disappointed to hear the secretary say that "there is no urgent requirement to put in new monitoring wells in the near future."
Outside the hearing room, Tongate accused Coghlan of profiting from his criticism of environmental failures at the lab. "We think you are in a mode- I would call it a collaborationist- with Los Alamos," Coghlan fired back, "which we don't like." "Well, I would call it cooperative," Tongate said of his agency's relationship with the lab. "I don't see any benefit in being adversarial," he said, "the way it was" under the previous administration.
Los Alamos Monitor, November 1, 2017:
Santa Fe's call to halt plutonium pit program will not affect Los Alamos
Nuclear Watch Executive Director Jay Coghlan said they would like to see more communities in the region pass similar resolutions, with a goal to get LANL and the state to listen to their concerns. Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales is the chairman the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, a coalition that represents the community’s interests in relation to the LANL. "Other local governments may pass resolutions similar to that just passed by the City of Santa Fe. Perhaps this could persuade the Regional Coalition to actively advocate for enhanced nuclear safety before plutonium pit production is expanded, and genuine, comprehensive cleanup that could truly drive regional economic development," Coghlan said in a written statement.
Oak Ridge Today, October 23, 2017:
DOE, NNSA deny alleged risk of 'catastrophic collapse' of old Y-12 buildings
The plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in July alleged that there is a risk of a catastrophic collapse of old buildings containing nuclear weapon components at the Y-12 National Security Complex, possibly due to a large earthquake. The 44-page civil complaint, which is related to the planned Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12, was filed July 20 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The seven plaintiffs include three public interest organizations- Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, and Natural Resources Defense Council of Washington, D.C.
Santa Fe New Mexican, September 19, 2017:
Further tests are needed after tainted well sample, officials say
"Scott Kovac, with the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which first discovered lab reports of the new well's chromium levels on a website, said the state and federal response to the issue leaves significant questions about how large the plume really is and how the laboratory will proceed in treating the extensive contamination.
"'LANL has spent millions of dollars on the models and used the data to choose the location of the well in question,' he said, yet 'the models missed the size of the plume.' If water is injected into the newly drilled well to pump and treat the contamination, 'the plume will likely grow,' he added. "Now, Kovac said, the lab's whole mitigation plan 'has just turned into big question mark.'"
Albuquerque Journal, September 18, 2017:
High chromium levels found at one Los Alamos well
"The readings were first made public by Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which said in a news release, 'The new data suggest there will have to be a complete rethinking of chromium groundwater treatment' and that cleanup will take longer and cost more."
Los Alamos Monitor, September 18, 2017:
Mortandad Canyon chromium plume may be wider than expected
"According to Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan, the data further bolsters the group's argument that the Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department need to rework its 2016 consent order. The order is a blueprint of cleanup criteria and milestones LANL and the DOE Environmental Management office needs to adhere to in its waste cleanup operations around the site.
"Timely budgets for additional urgently needed cleanup work at Los Alamos are far from being a given. The 2016 Consent Order that NMED and DOE negotiated both weakened and delayed cleanup at LANL, and allows DOE to get out of cleanup by simply claiming that it is too expensive or difficult, Coghlan said. 'But we demand that DOE find additional funding to immediately address this threat to New Mexico's precious water resources, without robbing other badly needed cleanup projects.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, September 16, 2017:
Cancer-causing chemicals appear to spread in regional aquifer near LANL
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which first discovered the high levels of chromium in CrIV-6, called the plume a serious threat to New Mexico's water resource.
"'The remediation is turning out to be this decades-long- or longer- process of investigating exactly where the plume is,' said Scott Kovac, director of operations and research for Nuclear Watch.'The geology under Los Alamos is so complicated, anybody that says they know what's happening under there is taking liberties.'
Kovac said the high levels of chromium indicate the plume may be growing more rapidly than the lab anticipated and may result in higher costs, as well as a longer time frame, to clean up the widespread pollution.
"'It is easy for data to get buried and never see the light of day in the Lab's contamination database,' he added in a statement. 'LANL should proactively keep the public continuously informed of important new developments.'"
KSFR Radio Santa Fe, Sept 7, 2017:
Rep. Ted Lieu and Jay Coghlan Interview on 101.1 FM
Congressman Lieu (D.CA) was given the Leadership Award by Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in May of this year for his sponsorship of HR 669, a bill to restrict the president's sole authority to launch nuclear war (mirrored in the Senate by S.200 introduced by Sen. Ed Markey D.MA). Nukewatch director Jay Coghlan is the current chairman of ANA. "Living on the Edge" with David Bacon, 101.1 FM
***Archived Podcast***
Albuquerque Journal, September 5, 2017:
When it comes to nukes, it’s complicated
[Regarding a resolution before the Santa Fe City Council]
"Here's what Jay Coghlan of the watchdog Nuclear Watch New Mexico group said about the Obama administration's last budget plan: 'Recall that President Obama received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Instead, the last budget of his
administrations sets an all-time record for funding Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs. What this means at Los Alamos is that the lab's future is being increasingly tied to expanded production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons.'" Albuquerque Journal, September 5, 2017:
LANL director announces retirement
"The watchdog Nuclear Watch New Mexico said of McMillan's departure: 'There's got to be a whole lot more behind this abrupt resignation.… He's the poster child for why the profit motive should not run nuclear weapons facilities. Here's hoping for better LANL management next time.' The lab listed McMillan's total compensation at $1.5 million in a 2013 federal disclosure report."
Santa Fe New Mexican Sep 5, 2017 :
Los Alamos lab director retiring at year's end
"Others said the high salary that McMillan received while he oversaw serious safety lapses highlighted fundamental issues at the lab. Jay Coghlan, director of the watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said, 'We like to call him McMillion for the annual paycheck he was receiving while running the lab into the ground with an exploding radioactive waste drum at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and ongoing nuclear safety lapses at Los Alamos' plutonium facility. He's the poster child for why the profit motive should not run nuclear weapons facilities,' he said.
"With the lab management contract out for bid, Coghlan and others, including the University Professional and Technical Employees union, have questioned the for-profit management model at the lab, which began when Los Alamos National Security was hired in 2006 to run LANL." Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 2017:
Two board members question move by nuclear safety agency
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico commended the two board members for raising objections. 'It's part of a continuing pattern to try and muzzle the board,' he said of the staff deal. "Don Hancock of the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center said it was 'pretty unusual' to see a public split among DNFSB members, who are presidential appointees. 'From the public's standpoint, we need more confidence in the oversight of DOE and the NNSA, not less,' he said."
Colorado Daily, August 10, 2017:
Peace Train: On the brink of nuclear hostilities
"If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."
- President Harry Truman, Aug. 6, 1945
"They will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen before."
- President Donald Trump, Aug. 8, 2017
"Steve Miller of Nuclear Watch New Mexico noticed the two similar quotes, from Truman and Trump, 72 years apart. Two hours later, North Korea said it was reviewing plans to strike U.S. military targets in Guam with medium-range ballistic missiles to create "enveloping fire," according to North Korean state media.
"Miller went on to say, 'So here we stand on the brink of nuclear hostilities. Note that the nuclear weapons state with the smallest arsenal and a barely functioning ICBM is still an existential threat, even to the country with the largest arsenal and the most advanced delivery systems on the planet. It seems that the nuclear weapon is most useful to the smallest power, transforming it
from a military gnat into a lethal danger to even the most powerful states. One would think that it would be in the interest of the powerful country to seek the complete removal of nuclear weapons from the picture. ASAP. But in fact, given the opportunity- of the Ban Treaty negotiations for example- the US has refused to have anything to do with any such effort. ('We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it.'). Instead, a trillion dollar renewal and 'modernization' of our nuclear forces is planned. Where does that road lead?'"
Aug 3, 2017
Jay Coghlan, Nukewatch Director Interview
With David Bacon on Living on the Edge, KSFR. Archived podcast here
Santa Fe New Mexican, August 4, 2017:
Lab Might Have Known Dangerous Waste Was Unmarked
"Jay Coghlan, director of the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico, questioned why, if the state had discovered the problem with the container, it didn't 'deal with it immediately as an imminent danger that put workers and the public at risk?'
"Coghlan said the state has undervalued the lab's waste management violations in the past, setting fines that are too low. And, he said, millions of dollars in fines for a number of violations that accrued under a 2005 consent order governing the management of the lab's legacy waste went unpaid. Instead, the cleanup order was revised in June 2016, and outstanding penalties were wiped away.
"Coghlan filed a lawsuit against the state for not imposing penalties under the former cleanup agreement, but a ruling in that case is still pending.
"The Environment Department has said the new consent order creates a stronger enforcement policy than the previous agreement.
"Coghlan disagrees. 'All of this demonstrates a lack of oversight,' he said, 'and a failure to use its authority on the part of Governor Martinez and the Environment Department.'"
ABC News, May 27, 2017:
US nuclear lab's future up in the air after recent fire
"Fattening up our already bloated nuclear weapons stockpile is not going to improve our national security," said Jay Coghlan, the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, in a news release issued Friday. "New Mexicans desperately need better funded schools and health care, not expanded plutonium pit production that will cause more pollution and threaten our scarce water
resources."
(Article picked up from the SF NewMexican piece below)
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 20, 2017:
Lab fire highlights ongoing LANL waste problems
"Fattening up our already bloated nuclear weapons stockpile is not going to improve our national security," said Jay Coghlan, the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, in a news release issued Friday. "New Mexicans desperately need better funded schools and health care, not expanded plutonium pit production that will cause more pollution and threaten our scarce water resources." Los Alamos Monitor, March 31, 2017:
Citizen board recommends DOE shed more light on WIPP waste storage
"Scott Kovac, of Nuclear Watch, wished the DOE didn't propose the above ground facility in the first place, because it adds an extra step and delays in getting the dangerous waste into WIPP's permanent below ground facility.
"'They should just spend the money fixing up WIPP instead of these other things, I think they'd be farther along.' Kovac said."
Reaching Critical Will, March 28, 2017:
US Nuclear Weapon Modernization: Implications For The Ban Treaty
Report on the panel discussion at the UN, March 28, 2017.
"Coghlan said that responsibility for pit fabrication shifted to Los Alamos National Lab in the late 1980s, but repeated efforts to establish full-scale (80 warheads/ year) production capacity have failed. The Trump Administration and a Republican Congress are likely to advance funding for new pit facilities at Los Alamos. 'All of this is in the name of Stockpile Stewardship,' said Coghlan, 'which is a fig leaf to disguise new weapons design.'"
"More information on US modernization plans can be found in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability's Trillion Dollar Trainwreck."
Truth-Out, March 6, 2017:
Trump Is Bankrupting Our Nation to Enrich the War Profiteers
This is a well researched paper [in spite of blaming Obama admin developments on Trump] with many linked sources, including in three instances, links to NukeWatch.org:
- "Yet the Trump administration [sic] is proposing to spend a trillion dollars or more over the next three decades upgrading the US nuclear weapons triad..."
- "We know from other sources that $1.4 billion a year is coming from the DOE for operation of the Sandia nuclear weapons lab..."
- "Components arm, fuse, fire, generate neutrons to start nuclear reactions..."
The Daily Beast, February 28, 2017:
What Was Trump’s Air Force Pick Doing For All That Cash?
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear watchdog group in Wilson’s home state, was even more skeptical. Wilson's work for Lockheed Martin and other nuclear contractors "obviously raises very serious ethical questions," Coghlan said. Coghlan conceded that the recent presidential election represented a vote for change, but added that "part of that change should be appointing ethical people to senior positions. And [Wilson has] failed that test."
Center for Public Integrity, February 8, 2017:
Air Force Secretary Nominee Helped A Major Defense Contractor Lobby For More Federal Funds
Wilson's appointment got the attention of an anti-nuclear watchdog group in her home state, Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Wilson ignored pleas by the group's executive director, Jay Coghlan, to step down from the congressional commission over the perceived conflict of interest.
For Nuclear Watch New Mexico's Coghlan, Wilson's prospective role as the head of the Air Force- one of the primary customers for Lockheed Martin and the other nuclear weapon contractors that employed her- sets off alarms.
"It obviously raises very serious ethical questions," Coghlan said. "The presidential vote can be viewed as a popular vote for change, but part of that change should be appointing ethical people to senior positions. And she's failed that test. I anticipate she's going to be asked some tough questions during her confirmation hearing."
Politico, February 8, 2017:
Records show how Air Force nominee skirted lobbying restrictions
Same article by Patrick Malone as above, including the same citations of Nuclear Watch and Jay Coghlan.
NM Political Report, February 10, 2017:
Air Force Secretary nominee helped a major defense contractor lobby for more federal funds
Same article by Patrick Malone as above, including the same citations of Nuclear Watch and Jay Coghlan.
Santa Fe New Mexican, January 4, 2017:
LANL Improves In Annual Federal Evaluation; Safety, Waste Issues Persist
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement that while the Energy Department has said it learned its lesson from Rocky Flats, Los Alamos "has had a long history of inadequate safety analyses and unacceptable nuclear criticality risks."
"Clearly these issues need to be 100 percent resolved before NNSA even thinks about expanding plutonium pit production," he said.
Albuquerque Journal, January 4, 2017:
Amid transitions, both NM nuke labs get good evaluations
Despite this year's "very good" rating for LANL, Watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico noted shortcomings that NNSA cited in the evaluation over criticality safety issues related to plutonium work (a nuclear criticality event is an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction) as the lab moves toward ramping up production of plutonium "pits," the cores that trigger nuclear weapons' explosions. Parts of the evaluation say that required improvements "to the Criticality Safety Program are moving at an unacceptably slow rate" and that the leadership in operations management "has not prioritized needed criticality safety activities and improvements adequately... The number and latency of infractions in the plutonium facility is of concern." 2016
The Guardian, November 1, 2016:
Atomic City, USA: how once-secret Los Alamos became a millionaire's enclave
Home to the scientists who built the nuclear bomb, the company town of Los Alamos, New Mexico is today one of the richest in the country – even as toxic waste threatens its residents and neighboring Española struggles with poverty
"'It's a stark example of the proverbial 1% and the other 99%,' says Jay Coghlan, sitting in a large reclining chair in the living room of his home in Santa Fe. A 45 minute drive south-east from Los Alamos, his home doubles as an office for Nuclear Watch New Mexico. 'Neighboring communities have not benefited much at all, with the obvious exception that there's jobs,' he says. 'Benefits have been very insular and privileged to the nuclear enclave itself.' The environmental impact of living next door to a nuclear research lab is another sore issue. Some radioactive waste is still disposed of at the lab's 'Area G' compound (although this could end next year), and there is still so-called 'legacy waste', which has not been cleaned up and will take billions of dollars to address. The carcinogenic plume of hexavalent chromium, meanwhile, which was discovered 10 years ago, is migrating towards nearby Native lands and the regional aquifer."
Santa Fe New Mexican, October 10, 2016:
LANL makes progress on Area G cleanup, but doubts remain
"Watchdog groups suggested the decision was based on the fact that Area G is nearing capacity. The last open trench, pit 38, which spans more than 100 meters, is the only area with space to accept new waste. 'The pit is going to be full,' said Scott Kovac, research director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico. 'It is not like they are just stopping out of the goodness of their own heart.' Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said these estimates were based on false
assumptions. 'I will call it willful misrepresentation, ignoring 90 percent of the waste that is there,' he said. Coghlan estimates that the full scope of waste is 30 times higher than the numbers provided by the lab."
Sputnik International News, October 6, 2016:
End of US-Russia Plutonium Pact 'Not Catastrophic' for Nonproliferation Goals
WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein. Nuclear Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan claims that Moscow's decision to cancel the US-Russia Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, which is aimed at reducing stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium, will not hurt the goal of nuclear nonproliferation.
"Moscow's decision to cancel the US-Russia Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, which is aimed at reducing stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium, will not hurt the goal of nuclear nonproliferation, Nuclear Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan told Sputnik. "It's significant, but not catastrophic," Coghlan said on Wednesday. "I still think that both countries will eventually dispose of the excess plutonium. But I cynically add that this is only because…both countries already have too much plutonium for their weapons, so they don't really care."
"Coghlan expressed skepticism that any significant nonproliferation goals would have been met under the agreement.
"'The US has more than enough plutonium to do what it wants with nuclear weapons on into the indefinite future,' he said. Because the agreement calls for converting weapons-grade plutonium into a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel to be used for civilian nuclear power, Russia could continue producing plutonium, Coghlan argued. 'Russian use of MOX in breeder reactors could produce additional plutonium, depending on how the reactors are configured,' he stated."
Albuquerque Journal, October 6, 2016:
Report: Los Alamos to end radioactive on-site waste disposal
"Critics maintain the DOE's cost estimates are low and note that the agency expects to use an engineered cover' at the site, instead of exhuming and removing hazardous materials, which Nuclear Watch New Mexico says would leave the materials permanently buried above the regional aquifer and three miles uphill from the Rio Grande.
"New Mexico and the U.S. Energy Department first signed a consent order that guides cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory more than a decade ago. A revised order was signed this year. Nuke Watch is challenging the new agreement in court."
Santa Fe New Mexican, September 24, 2016:
After controversial firing, ex-LANL employee looking to rebuild career
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said it was "highly unethical of the lab to fire him in the first place, and they were stomping on his right to free speech because he wasn't stomping for the party line... His study was retroactively classified and the lab could do that because of just one word that he used," Coghlan said. "And that word is 'Israel.' He listed Israel among the known nuclear weapons powers - didn't single Israel out, just, again, mentioned the word Israel. So it goes to show just how ridiculous the nuclear weapons policies are about the use of classification. That's kind of the worst-kept secret in the world - that Israel has nuclear weapons."
Albuquerque Journal, September 21, 2016:
Nuke Watch: Lab cleanup report understates costs, waste amounts at Los Alamos
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico says a highly touted new cost estimate for completing cleanup of decades’ worth of radioactive and hazardous waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory is based more on the likely stream of federal funding rather than the actual cost of dealing with the toxic materials." Note: This entire article is a review of Nuclear Watch's critique of the new DOE report on LANL cleanup; see the full article.
San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 2016:
Los Alamos Lab in for long environmental clean-up process
"Advocacy groups have challenged the validity of the clean-up process. Some say the polluted water is still doing damage and making animals sick. 'The Department of Energy and Los Alamos Labs, they need to have their feet held to the fire,' said Jay Coghlan, director of anti- nuclear weapons group Nuke Watch New Mexico. His group recently filed a lawsuit, calling for a judge to void a new clean-up agreement between the state and federal government." (Article deleted)
Amarillo Globe-News, September 8, 2016:
Report: Pantex in dire need of upgrades
"However, some nuclear watchdogs are not convinced. Jay Coghlan- a representative of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a group that seeks to promote safety and environmental protection at regional nuclear facilities- said the cost of nuclear facilities is 'a real burden on the American taxpayer. The $3.7 billion is a big number that has accrued over the years that shows chronic disregard of safety.' He pointed to comments from Thornberry made in 2015 during a talk at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in the field of international affairs, alleging that workers at nuclear facilities have to 'shoot rats off of their lunch in some of the facilities that they were working in.' In Coghlan's view, the federal government is too lax in its oversight of Pantex and other national security complexes. 'This is one of the root problems. The private contractors who essentially run (Pantex) are greedy and on the lookout for more money, however they can get it,' Coghlan said. 'If they had prudently safeguarded things as it went along, they wouldn't be asking for more taxpayer money.'"
KUNM FM, September 7, 2016:
LANL's Long Environmental Cleanup
All said, the cleanup at Los Alamos has been a contentious process, to put it mildly. "'It's gutless,' said Jay Coghlan, director of the anti-nuclear weapons group Nuke Watch New Mexico. 'The Department of Energy and Los Alamos Labs, they need to have their feet held to the fire.' "Nuke Watch recently filed a lawsuit asking a judge to throw out a new cleanup agreement between the state and the federal government- called a consent order- saying it is ineffective and was put together without the required public input.
"'They've now come out with a new consent order that lacks any true enforceability,' Coghlan said. "For example, the department of energy or Los Alamos lab can simply claim that it doesn't have enough money for cleanup and then get out of cleanup. Or claim that it's too technically difficult.'
"The New Mexico Environment Department has criticized the DOE's cleanup proposals, too, but they've called Nuke Watch's lawsuit 'frivolous' and are now seeking to block it in court."
Albuquerque Journal, September 1, 2016:
State: Dismiss LANL cleanup lawsuit
"The New Mexico Environment Department has asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Nuclear Watch New Mexico that seeks invalidation of a new agreement between the state and federal governments over cleanup of radioactive and hazardous waste from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"Nuke Watch maintains that a June 'consent order' agreement between the Environment Department and DOE was executed without a formal public hearing, as required by terms of an original 2005 cleanup deal between the state and the federal government.
"The Nuke Watch litigation also alleges DOE and the private contractor that runs the laboratory owe hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for missing cleanup deadlines set in 2005... The department wasn't named as a defendant in the Nuke Watch suit but intervened in the case. "Nuke Watch director Jay Coghlan said via email Wednesday there's 'great irony in that NMED intervenes against us, raising the question whose side is it on, the environment or the polluter (in this case a $2.3 billion/year nuclear weapons facility).' Coghlan also noted state government's budget woes, which include a $600 million deficit. 'Yet by our tally NMED forgave more than $300 million in potential fines for missed milestones in the 2005 Consent Order,' he wrote."
Santa Fe New Mexican, August 31, 2016:
State seeks to block lawsuit over LANL cleanup deal
The 2016 cleanup agreement explicitly states that the final version is not subject to appeal or public hearing, which drew criticism in June from several groups that said such language stifles public input.
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch, called the department's argument "flimsy semantics." "The so-called Environment Department, whose charge is to protect the environment, takes an existing consent order that was pretty tough and essentially guts it, and further claims the public has no recourse," he told The New Mexican on Wednesday.
Coghlan said Nuclear Watch maintains that the full public participation requirements apply to the new guidelines.
At a time when the state faces a massive deficit, Coghlan added, the state deferred to the interests of the lab and the Department of Energy rather than enforcing violations that would have generated funds for the state through fines and would have provided jobs in waste cleanup.
Some people praised the new agreement, but others raised concerns that it fails to establish any real, long-term cleanup deadlines and includes language that would enable cleanup work to be suspended if it were deemed too costly or "unreasonable."
"We are seeing the level of funding go down for cleanup while weapons programs are rising, and the consent order is no longer the stick by which to compel increased funding for cleanup because its not enforceable," Coghlan said. "It's a giveaway."
Amarillo News, August 16, 2016:
Pantex Plant to store more nuclear materials produced at Los Alamos lab
"'Here you have the NNSA site with the most weapons-grade plutonium, a dramatically increasing mission in weapons production, yet the old site-wide environmental impact statement dates back to 1996,' said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. 'I would assert that an environmental statement is long overdue, whether we are approaching the cap on storage
at Pantex or not.'"
Albuquerque Journal, August 12, 2016:
LANL plutonium project called 'a house of cards'
"Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the GAO report reveals the CMMR project to be 'a house of cards.' He said the DOE, because of cost overruns and busted deadlines, has been on GAO's 'high-risk list' watch list for the past 25 years. 'I assert this is more of the same,' he said.
"Coghlan noted that the report makes it clear that NNSA intends to upgrade the existing Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building that opened in 2014 to a nuclear facility that can accommodate additional plutonium and giving it a 'Hazard Category 3' designation - the rating for a nuclear facility where the risks are 'for only local significant consequences,' as opposed to bigger risks of off-site or more widespread on-campus contamination.
"Coghlan said there's been no environmental impact statement on that change and points to findings in the report that LANL has already started acquiring glove-boxes for the rad-lab that would have to be changed out and that the ventilation system also would need to be improved. "'This is the first time ever the NNSA, a troubled agency to begin with, has taken a radiological lab and tried to make it into a Hazard Category 3,' he said."
August 6, 2016
Jay Coghlan, Nukewatch Director Interview
Earth Matters Radio re legacy of the US nuclear weapons program on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. Thursday Aug 6 at 10 am and 8 pm on 89.1FM. Archived podcast here
Albuquerque Journal, July 29, 2016:
Environment secretary resigns from Cabinet post
"'The departure of Ryan Flynn is very welcome for those of us who believe that the mission of the state Environment Department is to protect the environment,' said Douglas Meiklejohn, executive director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center. Flynn has also been at odds with Nuclear Watch New Mexico over a "consent order" agreement last month with the federal government over cleanup of decades worth of radioactive and hazardous waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Nuclear Watch has filed a court challenge to the deal, saying it contains too many loopholes.
"Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan said the consent order 'is going to be a big stain on (Flynn's) legacy. Having said that, I'll give him kudos that he did give us pretty good access and did hold serious discussions with us.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, July 28, 2016:
Feds estimates LANL cleanup at $1 billion less than state
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in a statement that the federal cost estimate is not merely too low but also suggests "that the Lab's major radioactive and toxic wastes dumps will not be cleaned up." The lower price point, he said, indicates the Energy Department plans to "cap and cover" the estimated 200,000 cubic yards of toxic waste at sites atop Los Alamos mesas rather than move it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad or another secure facility. The "so-called cleanup … leaves tons of radioactive and toxic wastes in the ground that will permanently threaten Northern New Mexico's precious water resources," Coghlan said. Nuclear Watch New Mexico has been critical of both the Energy Department and
the state Environment Department over delays in cleanup at Los Alamos. The organization filed a recent lawsuit against the lab and its federal regulators over an agreement with the state that governs the lab's cleanup activities.
New Mexico Political Report, July 22, 2016:
Lowered deadline standards on new nuclear cleanup plan worries some
"'The Department of Energy hates penalties,' Scott Kovac, research and operations director with Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in an interview. 'A deadline might shake out some funding from its budget.'
"Jon Block, a Santa Fe attorney helping Nuclear Watch in a lawsuit against the Environment Department over the cleanup issue, said consent orders on waste cleanup are supposed to allow states to hold the federal government accountable to complete the clean up. Instead, he argued that the state Environment Department is doing the opposite. 'They've turned over the cleanup to the polluter,' Block said in an interview. 'Instead of being the enforcer of noncompliance, they're the cooperator, the negotiator, 'we're your pal.' Block says this presents a problem because DOE's approach to cleaning up nuclear waste is to 'do the least work possible and spend the least amount of money.'
"The new consent order also gives DOE power to 'update' the Los Alamos cleanup deadlines based on issues like 'actual work progress, changed conditions and changes in anticipated funding levels.' To Kovac, this means that if DOE loses some of its money, the agency can use that as an excuse to not meet even the less flexible deadlines set under the new consent order."
Albuquerque Journal, July 19th, 2016:
Nuke Watch wants June LANL cleanup agreement tossed
"NuclearWatch New Mexico is asking a federal judge to invalidate a new agreement between New Mexico and the federal government over how and when to clean up decades' worth of hazardous waste left over from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"In an expanded version of a lawsuit Nuke Watch filed in May, the advocacy group maintains that the June "consent order" agreement between the New Mexico Environment Department and the federal Department of Energy was executed without a required, formal public hearing. "Scott Kovac, Nuke Watch's research director, said in statement, "We will not let the public's right for cleanup at the Los Alamos Lab be papered over by DOE and NMED. Both agencies agreed to all parts of the 2005 Consent Order, which included rigorous public participation requirements and a detailed the cleanup schedule, including a final compliance date. We will continue to push for the public to have a true voice in these important matters."
New Mexico Environmental Law Center, July 19th, 2016:
Groups Ask Judge to Declare New LANL Consent Order Invalid
"On behalf of Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NukeWatch), the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed an amended complaint in its federal case to obtain 'reasonable but aggressive' cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The amended complaint asserts that the Consent Order signed by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) on June 24, 2016 is invalid."
Albuquerque Journal, July 14th, 2016:
Debate is on over making more nuke triggers at Los Alamos lab
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico notes that the wording of the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act that calls for making 80 pits annually asserts that the need is not driven solely by 'life extension programs' intended to keep current weapons in good shape.
"'It's not about simple maintenance,' Coghlan said. 'It's about advancing weapons designs … I assert that that's a blank check for them to do what they want to do.' He added: 'They are seeking to divorce expanded pit production from the technical necessities of the stockpile.'"
"Critics still say nothing has been offered to specifically justify up to 80 pits a year. 'You see the stated need and then there's no solid justification,' said Coghlan. He cites a 2008 interview with former Republican House member David Hobson of Ohio, who helped fight off the Modern Pit Facility. When Hobson questioned the need for 450 pits annually after years of being told that the weapons stockpile was in good shape, NNSA came back with a new offer of 250 pits, Hobson told Mother Jones magazine. 'These were nuclear weapons we were talking about and they hadn't given it more thought than that?' said Hobson, who served in the House from 1991 through 2009.
"Coghlan and Mello dispute the need to replace or retire weapons that have ostensibly been well- maintained over the years and with the 2006 report supporting a long life remaining for existing pits. Coughlan cites a study by Sandia National Laboratory from 1993, just after the U.S. stopped real-world nuclear weapons test explosions, that found no example of 'a nuclear weapon retirement where age was ever a major factor in the retirement decision.'"
Albuquerque Journal, June 24, 2016:
New Mexico, feds ink new agreement for Los Alamos cleanup
"But the head of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which called for more public input on the new order and recently sued DOE and the lab’s contract operator for missing deadlines set in the 2005 consent order, says the new deal allows too much leeway. It 'puts DOE in the driver's seat' by permitting milestones or targets to be changed if there’s not adequate funding or when DOE determines that cleanup plans are 'technically infeasible.' Nuke Watch's Jay Coghlan said." "Coghlan said Flynn's claims about the new agreement are 'hollow and misleading' and that the document contains 'no long-term enforceability for cleanup at Los Alamos.' ... 'DOE can just go, 'This is not practical or feasible', and get out of it,' he said. Coghlan also said Flynn allowed LANL more than 150 compliance extensions under the old consent order and is 'now giving DOE a new gift' of enforcement loopholes.
Albuquerque Journal, June 17, 2016:
Environment Department: LANL cleanup could cost $4B
Some critics, however, have said that having flexible deadlines for cleanup work is not an effective way to hold the lab accountable.
In April, Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Los Alamos National Security and the Department of Energy over their failures to meet cleanup milestones under the 2005 consent order. The watchdog group said the state could have collected more than $300 million in penalties if the federal government was held accountable for the deadlines.
The state issued 150 extensions under the Martinez administration, which the lab still failed to meet, the group said.
Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan said in a news release at the time that the group was aiming to make the lab and federal agency "clean up their radioactive and toxic mess first before making another one for a nuclear weapons stockpile that is already bloated far beyond what we need."
He was referring to plans pending in Congress to increase plutonium pit production in Los Alamos over the coming decades.
Albuquerque Journal, June 17, 2016:
National military, policy experts to attend nuclear symposium
"But critics contend the billions spent on nuclear weapons in New Mexico don't help the economy as much as the labs' boosters claim. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which advocates for nuclear weapons budget reductions, characterized the coming symposium as a 'love fest for the pending $1 trillion modernization of U.S. nuclear forces, which has the usual giant defense contractors salivating over huge profits.'"
"Jay Coghlan, director of nuclear safety organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, says there’s no good reason to have kept this information from the public for so long, especially when we’re footing the bill for LANL’s budget. KSFR’s Kate Powell checked in with Coghlan and brings us this report."
Albuquerque Journal, June 3, 2016:
Lockheed Martin planning Sandia bid
'Critics of Lockheed Martin have said the company should be disqualified based on a 2014 report by the Department of Energy's Office of Inspector General that concluded the firm wrongfully used federal funds for lab operations to lobby for the no-bid contract extension it received several years ago. Sandia Corp. and its parent company, Lockheed Martin, paid the federal government a $4.8 million fine for using tax dollars to lobby Congress and federal agencies for renewal of its then-$2.4 billion Sandia contract with the Department of Energy in violation of federal law. '"How can Lockheed Martin be entrusted to run the country's biggest nuclear weapons lab when it intentionally violates established U.S. law?" asked Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which scrutinizes budgets and operations at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.
Public News Service, May 31, 2016:
Watchdog Sues Feds Over Los Alamos Nuke Waste Removal
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, says the DOE and its contractor, Los Alamos National Security or LANS, has done little more than kick the can down the road. 'We are alleging 12 counts, and it's pretty much indisputable, where they have missed compliance milestone deadlines,' says Coghlan. 'So, that's what our lawsuit's about, to try and compel the lab to meet those deadlines, which have passed.'
"Coghlan says the New Mexico Environment Department is revising its 2005 consent order to extend the deadline beyond 2018 to clean up the dumpsite. But he says there is a loophole, for it to be enforceable Congress would have to OK enough funds to complete the project. Today is the last day for public comment on the revisions. Coghlan says under the original consent order, DOE and LANS a partnership that includes Bechtel Corporation and the University of California have racked up and not yet paid more than $300 million in fines for missing deadlines. He thinks they should be forced to pay and to complete the work they've already been paid billions to perform.
"'There is an estimated 200,000 cubic yards of mixed waste, both radioactive and hazardous,' says Coghlan. 'The lab's idea (of) cleaning up is capping and covering them, and leaving them permanently buried.'"
Santa Fe Reporter, May 18, 2016:
Stalled LANL Cleanup to Court
"'The federal government plans to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years completely rebuilding US nuclear forces. Meanwhile, cleanup at the Los Alamos Lab, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, continues to be delayed, delayed, delayed,' Jay Coghlan, executive director of NukeWatch, said in a press release. 'We seek to make the for-profit nuclear weaponeers clean up their radioactive and toxic mess first before making another one for a nuclear weapons stockpile that is already bloated far beyond what we need.'"
Albuquerque Journal, May 17, 2016:
Nuke Watch sues for fines against DOE, Los Alamos lab over missed cleanup deadlines
"Nuke Watch's lawsuit asks for a court order requiring DOE and LANS to meet the 2005 cleanup requirements "'according to a reasonable but aggressive schedule ordered by the court' and imposing the $37,000-per-day fines for each expired deadline- now approaches $300 million, Nuke Watch said in a news release.
"The suit, filed for Nuke Watch by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, does not name NMED as a defendant. But Nuke Watch attacked the state agency in its news release, saying that in 2011 under Gov. Susana Martinez, NMED allowed LANS 'to stop virtually all cleanup, instead engaging in a 'campaign' to move above-ground, monitored radioactive transuranic wastes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.'
"'… That campaign ended in disaster when an improperly treated radioactive waste drum from LANL ruptured, contaminating 21 workers and indefinitely closing that multi-billion dollar facility,' said Nuke Watch, referring to a February 2014 incident for which DOE has payed a $74 million settlement.
"Nuke Watch says NMED's proposed consent order revisions would settle the outstanding cleanup violations and 'absolve' DOE and LANS of any fines.
"Scott Kovac, Nuke Watch's research director, said that 'under the Martinez administration NMED granted more than 150 extension requests, and DOE and LANS have still missed many of those deadlines. Nuke Watch has taken this necessary step to enforce cleanup at LANL, to hold DOE accountable for protecting New Mexicans, and to make cleanup of legacy wastes the top priority. It's ridiculous that we have to have this cleanup debate after 70 years of contamination from nuclear weapons research and production.'"
Amarillo Globe-News, May 17, 2016:
Feds Give Pantex Contractor 'Scathing' Review
"'That blew my mind,' said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and board president of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. 'They were saying, 'We gotta have the B61-12. We gotta rush production. Then they send the wrong tail kit.'
... "'I was a little surprised,' Coghlan said. "(The strike) was one area where I thought that maybe CNS got unfairly dinged.'
... "'I think this is a root cause of a number of deficiencies. They are not being self-critical and they have their hand out for taxpayer money and expect to be paid,' Coghlan said.
"'We are talking about extremely serious matters here. We are talking about special nuclear materials where you could end up having criticality events.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 14, 2016:
Feds find progress in LANL's performance, but still short of mark
NukeWatch Director Jay Coghlan published comment:
"The article's last sentence on how LANL did not agree to standard whistleblower protection deserves special attention. This raises the question of who is calling the shots, the federal government as overseers, or the self-vested for-profit nuclear weapons lab that receives more than $2 billion in taxpayer money every year, and has a long dismal history of whistleblower retaliation.
"The NNSA's Performance Evaluation Report reads:
Several contract clauses that were bilaterally incorporated into prime contracts at all other NNSA sites, including clauses for whistleblower protection for Laboratory employees and for conference management requirements, were not accepted by the Laboratory, resulting in atypical unilateral modifications by NNSA. ((report, see p. 44)
"I find this a shocking example of Lab exceptionalism, when every other NNSA site has agreed to standard whistleblower protections, but LANL does not. This is especially striking when Los Alamos is arguably the most scandal-ridden NNSA site, from the botched Wen Ho Lee affair to the missing classified tapes to the abrupt firing of two highly experienced investigators brought in to root out corruption at the Lab. How can an institution that routinely retaliates against whistleblowers be trusted?
"One of the things I am most proud about Nuclear Watch New Mexico is that we have three LANL whistleblowers on our Steering Committee. Whistleblowers must be honored, not retaliated against, for standing up on principle and exposing the incompetence, malfeasance, waste, fraud and abuse that is endemic across the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex, but seems especially pronounced at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). "One cure is to have Congress make Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the for-profit contractor running the Lab, pay out of its own pocket for litigation costs against whistleblowers, instead of letting it keep its nose in a trough of unlimited taxpayers' money."
Jay Coghlan
Director, Nuclear Watch New Mexico
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 14, 2016:
Sandia Labs contract up for bid
Lockheed Martin is considered the front-runner, but Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, thinks it should be barred. A Department of Energy Office of Inspector General report in 2014 found that Lockheed Martin used taxpayer money in lobbying for its no- bid contract extension several years ago. Sandia Corp. and Lockheed Martin paid a $4.8 million fine. "The lab does create jobs, of that there is no dispute, but there is a lot of economic propaganda that it has this multiplying effect," Coghlan also said. "I just don't think it's true."
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 13, 2016:
Nuclear watchdog group sues feds, LANL over 2005 accord
"The nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court, accusing the federal government and lab managers of over a dozen violations of a 2005 consent
order to clean up hazardous waste left after decades of nuclear weapons and chemical research. Under federal law, if the nonprofit wins the case, the lab and the federal agency could be on the hook for $37,500 a day for each violation of the order."
Albuquerque Journal, May 13, 2016:
Sandia gets outstanding evaluation from feds, but is criticized for lobbying
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, in a statement today, reacted to the evaluation's comment that the lobbying controversy had hurt Sandia's reputation.
"'What an understatement!' he wrote in an email. He said 'Lockheed Martin should be made to seriously pay for its lobbying crimes at Sandia' and called the $140,000 fee deduction for leadership 'peanuts.'
"'This is absurd and another sign of the out-of-control nuclear weapons industry, when Sandia officials should have been prosecuted for blatantly illegal lobbying activities and Lockheed Martin barred from competing for Sandia's new management contract because of its criminal history.'"
Albuquerque Journal, May 13, 2016:
Sandia Labs earn high marks in annual review
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico reacted by saying in a statement that Lockheed Martin “should be made to seriously pay for its lobbying crimes at Sandia” and called the $140,000 fee deduction “peanuts.” “Sandia officials should have been prosecuted for blatantly illegal lobbying activities and Lockheed Martin barred from competing for Sandia’s new management contract because of its criminal history,” he said
Santa Fe New Mexican May 12, 2016:
Nuclear watchdog group sues feds, LANL over 2005 accord
The nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court, accusing the federal government and lab managers of over a dozen violations of a 2005 consent order to clean up hazardous waste left after decades of nuclear weapons and chemical research. Under federal law, if the nonprofit wins the case, the lab and the federal agency could be on the hook for $37,500 a day for each violation of the order.
Without the extensions, argue attorneys for Nuclear Watch New Mexico, the lab and the Department of Energy are violating the consent order.
Albuquerque Journal, May 12, 2016:
Who will run Sandia Labs?
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nuclear weapons watchdog group, told the Journal the expectation that significant private-sector job growth can result from any new Sandia contract is naïve, especially given that the lab has been a part of the Albuquerque community for decades and the city’s economy is still sputtering.
"'The lab does create jobs, of that there is no dispute, but there is a lot of economic propaganda that it has this multiplying effect,' Coghlan said. 'I just don’t think it’s true.'
Coghlan also said although Sandia is 'clearly better-run' than Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, he would prefer that Lockheed Martin be barred from receiving a Sandia contract.
"'In my view, Lockheed Martin should be barred from competing because of its clearly illegal
lobbying practices,' Coghlan said."
Huntington News, May 3, 2016:
NNSA releases Environmental Review of UPF Bomb Plant Plans
"The Supplement Analysis (SA) does exactly what we expected," said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance which, along with Nuclear Watch New Mexico, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Supplement Analysis more than a year ago. "It attempts to shrug off radical changes as no big deal in order to move forward with the modernization of Y12."
“An SA is supposed to take a look at the existing environmental analysis and decide if it still matches up with the new proposed action. In this case, even though the new action is profoundly different from the old proposal, the NNSA says no new analysis is required.”
Los Alamos Daily Post, April 21, 2016:
Montano's Whistleblowing Recognized On Capitol Hill
On Tuesday, Montano was given an award by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, a national network of organizations devoted to issues of nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. He was recognized for his lifetime achievement as a whistleblower at LANL, where he worked for 32 years and retired in 2010, when his long-standing complaint of whistleblower retaliation was settled. During his embattled career he stood up to withering retaliation, while revealing business practice scandals at the lab, fighting for workers’ rights and uncovering pay discrepancies for female workers.
At a ceremony in the Senate Hart Building, Montano, along with Sen. Diane Feinstein, (D-Calif) and Rep. Adam Smith, (D-WA), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, also were honored for their efforts to hold the nuclear weapons military-industrial complex accountable.
"Nothing could mean more to me from any other group," Montano said. "These are people who are not paid for trying to do the right thing, dealing with issues of nuclear weapons and contamination of sites. They are my kind of people, doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do."
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and president of the ANA Board of Directors, said Montano's award was a tribute to his tireless efforts to expose fraud, waste and abuse and standing up against whistleblower retaliation. "We so value his courageous stance and he's been doing it over decades," Coghlan said in a call between lobbying visits in Washington Wednesday. "Whistleblowers are invaluable. We need to nurture them, not retaliate against them, and to listen carefully to the truth they speak to power."
Chuck Montano serves on the NuclearWatch NM steering committee.
Albuquerque Journal, April 8, 2016:
Watchdog pushes for labs' eval data
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico has filed a second request under the Freedom of Information Act for the evaluation reports, this time calling for 'expedited processing' for the documents that Nuke Watch maintains is required by law.
"Nuke Watch's new request cites part of the federal open records law that said agencies should provide a quick response to records requests if 'a compelling need exists when failure to obtain records expeditiously could reasonably be expected to pose a threat to the life or physical safety
of an individual or, when a request is submitted by a person primarily engaged in disseminating information and there is an urgency to inform the public about actual or alleged Federal Government activity.'
"Nuke Watch says that there is 'great public interest in the NNSA's Contractor Performance Evaluation Reports for many NNSA Facilities, but particularly in those reports for the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.'
"The letter from the watchdog group's Jay Coghlan and Scott Kovac cites a recent Journal editorial that said, 'Either the National Nuclear Security Administration is running really late in completing performance evaluations of national weapons contractors or it is stonewalling in releasing them. Neither possibility is good.' The Journal also has submitted a FOIA request for the evaluations.
"Nuke Watch notes that, in 2012, after release of PERs was denied, it filed a lawsuit. The evaluations were released six days later and have since been posted annually. The latest request says that, under FOIA, the reports must be posted online in the NNSA's 'Electronic Reading Room' because the evaluations are 'frequently requested records.'"
Albuquerque Journal, March 31, 2016:
State proposes overhaul of LANL cleanup agreement with DOE
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said Wednesday he found too many loopholes in the draft agreement. He said it essentially holds cleanup hostage to DOE funding and that 'if DOE finds cleanup impractical' or technically unfeasible, 'they can get out of it.' Under the draft plan, milestones required of the DOE would be enforced using penalties. Coghlan commented that Flynn 'said the current consent order doesn't work. The reason it didn't work is because he eviscerated the consent order with more than 150 milestone extensions.' "Coghlan also said again that there hasn't been enough public participation in the consent order changes and they should have faced a formal process under which interested parties could request hearings to resolve disagreements."
Albuquerque Journal, March 30, 2016:
NM Environment Dept. rolls out new plan to require cleanup at Los Alamos
"Critics including Nuclear Watch New Mexico have said development of the draft proposal should have gone through a more formal public hearing process under which interested parties can request hearings to resolve disagreements and call witnesses that can be cross-examined. A hearing officer then would make recommendations to the Environment Department."
Santa Fe New Mexican, March 30, 2016:
Feds plan to send nuke waste to N.M.
"In January, the watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a notice with the state Environment Department of its intent to sue over the missed deadline.
"Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the ventilation problems at WIPP are worrisome and need to be resolved before the plutonium is stored there. 'We don’t think they can do it without compromising workers safety,' he said of the plutonium plan. Plutonium is highly carcinogenic when it’s inhaled, he said."
Santa Fe New Mexican, March 30, 2016:
New Mexico rolls out cleanup proposal for federal lab
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico argued that there are "giant loopholes" in the proposal that would allow the Department of Energy to call the shots and even delay cleanup if funding isn't available... He also voiced concerns about the lack of public participation in developing the order and the ability of the public to weigh in on future changes.
"Watchdog groups have been critical of cleanup efforts at the lab, suggesting officials aren't going far enough to address the waste that was placed in drums, plastic bags and cardboard boxes and buried years ago in unlined pits and shafts on lab property. Nuclear Watch New Mexico contends soil samples taken from Area G show detectable amounts of plutonium and americium. The group maintains there are still threats to the regional aquifer that supplies water to several Northern New Mexico communities and that the radioactive waste needs to be moved before cleanup can begin at Area G.
"We want nothing short of comprehensive cleanup at the Los Alamos lab," Coghlan said. "That would be a real win-win for New Mexicans, permanently protecting our water and the environment while creating hundreds of high-paying jobs."
Albuquerque Journal, March 23, 2016:
LANL meeting with safety board reveals concerns
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said the lab’s belief in its own “exceptionalism” is the problem and that LANL feels it doesn’t have to follow DOE rules."
Albuquerque Journal, March 18, 2016:
NNSA fails to release lab evaluations for past fiscal year
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said this week, "There is no good reason why the government should withhold information on how contractors paid by the American taxpayer perform. It looks like we going to have to sue again to get what should have already been automatically released in the name of good governance and contractor accountability."
Independant News, Jan 28, 2016:
Lawsuit Filed Against DOE, Los Alamos
"A New Mexico anti-nuclear group last week announced plans to sue the U.S. Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory, charging that the Laboratory has continually failed to meet hazardous waste cleanup milestones established by the state's Environment Department. The plans were detailed in a January 20 letter from the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, a Santa Fe based firm representing the anti-nuclear organization, Nuclear Watch New Mexico. "According to a news release issued by Nuclear Watch, the January 20 letter gives the formal notice that is required in order to file the suit, 'which (we) intend to do within 60 days.' Jay Coghlan, director of the anti-nuclear group, complained, 'The nuclear weaponeers plan to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years completely rebuilding U.S. nuclear forces (while) cleanup at the Los Alamos Lab, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, continues to be delayed, delayed, delayed.' He said the lawsuit would aim to force DOE and Los Alamos 'to clean up their radioactive and toxic mess first before making another one for a nuclear weapons stockpile that is already bloated far beyond what we need.'
"A $74 million settlement between DOE and the New Mexico Environment Department, announced late last week, will not affect plans for the lawsuit, according to Scott Kovac, another Nuclear Watch leader. That settlement was related to problems arising from shipments of
transuranic radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant."
Amarillo News, Jan 24, 2016:
Rise in plutonium production points to more work at Pantex
"'Expanded plutonium pit production at the Los Alamos Lab is really all about future new-design nuclear weapons with new military capabilities produced through so-called Life Extension Programs for existing nuclear weapons,' said Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan.
"'The real irony is that this Interoperable Warhead has been delayed for at least five years, if not forever, because of its enormous estimated expense and Navy skepticism. Yet this doesn't keep Los Alamos and the (National Nuclear Security Administration) from spending billions of taxpayer dollars ... for unnecessary and provocative expanded plutonium pit production.'
"'In reality, no stockpile pits have been manufactured since 2011, and none are currently scheduled, to us illustrating the lack of true need for any pit production to begin with,' Coghlan said. 'Future production would be for W87 pits for the Interoperable Warhead that would be a combined W78 and W97 warhead. But again, the IW has been delayed for 5 years, which bureaucratically could mean its death, especially given lack of Navy support.'"
- Story also carried by Lubbock Online
Los Alamos Daily Post, Jan 24, 2016:
LANL's Plutonium Plans Move Forward, Draw Fire
"The over-all 100-fold increase in exposure was criticized last week by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and Nuclear Watch New Mexico and will certainly be challenged as the project unfolds."
KRQE/AP, Jan 23, 2016:
Nuclear trigger production could resume at Los Alamos lab
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said there is no need for expanded production in terms of the safety and reliability of the current stockpile, but that it is needed for future designs."
Public News Service, Jan. 22, 2016:
Watchdog Plans Lawsuit Over Lack of Los Alamos Cleanup
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico has put the federal government and the Los Alamos National Laboratory on notice that it plans to sue over what it contends is the failure to clean up nuclear and toxic waste at the lab site. The watchdog group says the lab hasn't executed its part of a 2005 consent order with the New Mexico Environmental Department to remove the waste. The group's biggest concern at Los Alamos is a site known as 'Area G,' which Nuclear Watch director Jay Coghlan said contains up to 200,000 cubic yards of poisonous debris, much of it left over from the Cold War. 'It's a waste dump for both radioactive and toxic materials that dates back to 1957,' he said. 'The lab plans to simply cap and cover it, and leave it forever.'
"Coghlan said the deadline for the lab to have a cleanup plan in place was last December. Coghlan said his group's concerns were raised recently when DOE announced plans for a trillion-dollar upgrade of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, with much of that money earmarked to improve the facilities at Los Alamos. 'To oversimplify, the nuclear weaponeers are getting ready to create a whole new round of nuclear weapons,' he said. 'Before cleaning up their first mess, they're getting ready to cause another.' He said Nuclear Watch filed a legally required notice with
DOE this week, and if the department takes no action, his group will file suit within 60 days to enforce the consent agreement.
"The DOE complaint letter is online at Nukewatch.org."
Albuquerque Journal North, Jan 22, 2016:
‘Steps’ toward pit production made at Los Alamos
The Nuclear Watch New Mexico watchdog group, in a news release last week, said the recent moves "make explicit" the decision to expand pit-production capabilities at Los Alamos.
Lab watchdogs in New Mexico don't believe a case has been made for mass production of pits, even as they also question DOE's plans for how to make more of the nuclear triggers.
Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said, "There is no need for expanded plutonium pit production to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile, but it is vital for future new designs that the nuclear weaponeers want."
Santa Fe New Mexican, Jan. 22, 2016:
Watchdog plans to sue over LANL's delayed cleanup
"Cleanup at the Los Alamos Lab cannot be open-ended or it will never be accomplished," said Scott Kovac, a NukeWatch research director, in a statement issued Wednesday.
"We've got to stop seeing the decline in cleanup funding," Jay Coghlan, executive director of NukeWatch, said in an interview Thursday. Coghlan said the money should be directed to waste management rather than creating new waste. He believes the lab needs at least $50 million more than its annual funding for cleanup, a budget of about $185 million. "I really doubt [cleanup] will move forward without the lawsuit," he said.
NukeWatch said it is seeking full accountability at every step of the cleanup effort, as well as a public comment period before the new consent order is "set in stone."
Albuquerque Journal North, Jan. 21, 2016:
Nuclear Watch to sue over LANL cleanup problems
"We are putting the weaponeers on notice that they have to clean up their radioactive and toxic mess first before making another one for a nuclear weapons stockpile that is already bloated far beyond what we need," said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuke Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group. He was referring to DOE's recent preliminary approvals for changes at Los Alamos, including new underground facilities, to accommodate re-starting production of plutonium "pits," the triggers for nuclear weapons.
Nuke Watch's Coghlan said Wednesday that cleanup at Los Alamos "continues to be delayed, delayed, delayed," despite plans to spend a trillion dollars over 30 years to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons force.
Nuke Watch also has been pushing for a formal public hearing process- which Nuke Watch contends is required and allows interested parties to submit materials and question witnesses- as a revised consent order on cleanup is developed.
2015
Albuquerque Journal North, Dec. 18, 2015:
LANL contract up for bid after 2017
"Jay Coghlan of the Nuclear Watch New Mexico watchdog group said the situation as described by McMillan [in the Lab Director's letter to LANL employees], with LANS getting an extension despite failing to earn an award term, was 'deja vu all over again,' similar to a later-rescinded
waiver that granted LANS an award year for fiscal 2012, although it hadn't met all the performance criteria. 'It seems awfully premature for director McMillan to indicate there's going to be a contract extension before it's actually finalized by the U.S. government,' Coghlan said. 'He's putting the cart before the horse, maybe putting on a happy face for his employees before they leave for Christmas.'"
Santa Fe Reporter, Dec. 18, 2015:
Some Cleanup, Some Patience
"Here we are more than 40 years after the last chromium was dumped into Sandia Canyon, and we are now starting cleanup," Nuclear Watch New Mexico's Scott Kovac writes SFR in an email. "This shows the Lab's preferred cleanup method, 'natural attenuation,' is really not cleanup at all. It's time to start comprehensive cleanup across Los Alamos, instead of hoping for the contaminants to go away."
"'What they're doing is taking a dumb bomb and turning it into a smart bomb and claiming that it's not a new military capability,' said Jay Coghlan, executive director at Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonproliferation group. 'It just doesn't square with reality.'
"Coghlan added that the B61-12's improved accuracy and lower yield could make it easier to justify its use in the future, since smaller, more precise blasts mean less radioactive fallout. "Russia has its own modernization programs, Coghlan points out. 'The end result is an arms race.'"
Santa Fe Reporter, Dec. 8, 2015:
Los Alamos Cleanup Past Due
"'It's delay, delay, delay,' says Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a watchdog group that took the occasion to sound the alarm on the practices and failures that they see bogging down cleanup at the lab. 'Under the Martinez administration, the [New Mexico Environment Department] granted more than 150 extensions, which is the opposite of enforcement, and essentially eviscerated the consent order and we see declining levels of funding for cleanup at Los Alamos.' The concern is that the longer this cleanup is postponed, the more it will fade from memory, and the less people will think to argue for a cleanup that could bring jobs to the area now, and protect its groundwater for the long term. "'We hear that we can't afford to do cleanup and at the same time the US government is ready to embark on a trillion dollar modernization of nuclear forces, so budget arguments against cleanup ring pretty hollow in our view,' Coghlan says. 'Go ask the public what they want, and ask northern New Mexicans what they want. They want cleanup over weapons.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, Dec. 7, 2015:
LANL misses cleanup deadline set in 2005 for largest waste site
Sunday's deadline focused on "Area G," LANL's largest waste deposit site. A local watchdog group, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said comprehensive cleanup for the site "is still decades away." In a statement released Monday, Nuclear Watch stressed the need for public participation in the revised cleanup order, including a public hearing, and condemned a plan proposed by LANL to "cap and cover" waste in Area G.
"Cleanup just keeps being delayed. If not corrected, cleanup simply won't happen," said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch. "Nobody ever thought cleanup would be fully completed by the end of 2015; nobody is under any illusions about that," he added.
Santa Fe Reporter, Nov. 18, 2015:
Consenting to Cleanup
"Jay Coghlan said, 'My biggest fear is that through this revised consent order, the NMED is basically giving up on being in the driver's seat.' Coghlan said annual planning should be in the state's control, and pointed to 'the Department of Energy's presence on the Government Accountability Office's high-risk list for 25 years as justifying the skepticism... The department has a record of blown schedules and blown costs.' he said."
Albuquerque Journal, Nov. 13, 2015:
What price a LANL cleanup? Somewhere north of $1.2B, says NMED secretary
"During a public comment period, Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said Hintze shouldn't ask the public to be 'realistic' about the LANL cleanup because DOE itself is a 'thoroughly unrealistic department' with a history of blown deadlines and blown cost estimates. He said that what LANL gets for cleanup is small compared to what's being spent by DOE to develop 'smart' new nuclear weapons.
"Coghlan said NMED needs to be 'in the driver's seat' in dictating cleanup work to DOE and that NMED had 'eviscerated' the 2005 consent decree by granting more than 100 milestone extensions. The intent of the 2005 agreement was to 'make it hurt' when the lab didn't meet requirements, Coghlan said. Flynn responded that he agrees that NMED needs to be in the driver's seat and that his administration has fined DOE more than any agency in the country. But he said it was his job to make sure the lab is clean, and to protect people and the environment, not to 'punish the lab.'"
Los Alamos Daily Post, Nov. 13, 2015:
Wash, Dry And Repeat... Billion Dollar Cleanup Settlement Starts Over
"Scott Kovak of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said he would reserve his judgement until there were more concrete details about the nature of the campaigns, but that he didn't see what was wrong with having deadlines and deliverables. Why, when problems and surprises came up, did the managers not revise the schedules, he wondered. 'There is no reason that schedules could not have been updated along the way,' he said."
PBS News Hour, Nov. 5, 2015:
America's nuclear bomb gets a makeover
"Jay Coghlin is with Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear watchdog group. 'The American taxpayer should know that the directors of these nuclear weapons laboratories that are pushing these extreme proposals actually have an inherent conflict of interest: they are both the lab directors, and at the same time they are the presidents of the corporations running the labs. It's in their interest and to their bottom line to be able to have these life extension programs...'" (watch clip)
Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 9, 2015:
Consent Order on Los Alamos Lab Clean-up Facing Changes
"... But Nuclear Watch New Mexico is raising questions about how NMED is proceeding. The watchdog group says the state is violating the existing 2005 consent order by not following strict public participation rules that are part of the agreement.
'Our core fear is, we're afraid that the public participation ends up being public comment on a done deal already negotiated between DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the environment department,' said Nuclear Watch's Jay Coghlan. 'We are just not confident that deep changes would occur that way.
'What NukeWatch wants is genuine, comprehensive cleanup that would be real win-win for New Mexico, permanently protecting New Mexicans while creating hundreds of high-paying jobs,' said Coghlan.
Nuclear Watch's Coghlan and Scott Kovac point to a portion of the existing consent order that mandates using the permit rules for public participation before certain kinds changes to the consent order, including 'extension of final compliance date.'
'It's there in black and white,' said Coghlan.
In a letter to NMED, NukeWatch's leaders say 'we seek the full public participation process required by the existing Consent Order, which includes the opportunity for a hearing if negotiations are not successful.'
Coghlan said the rigorous public participation rules 'get to disagreements before there is a done deal.' NukeWatch wants to assure that the public has 'a role in defining a matter of public interest- cleanup at Los Alamos to protect our water supply,' he said.
Coghlan said NMED has in the past granted more than 100 extensions of the consent order milestones and that its previous effort at a 'campaign' approach- the 3706 Campaign to push the lab to move out all of the TRU waste drums- 'ended in disaster with the closure of WIPP.'
'Can we be confident that the environment department is going to meet the genuine expectations of the public and that the lab will thoroughly be cleaned up? The answer to that is no.'
In a formal statement, NMED said that, under the consent order revisions, 'We've received Nuclear Watch's letter indicating that they believe that the revision of the CO agreement should be treated as a permit renewal instead, with public involvement to include full, year-long adjudicative hearings and we are taking that point of view into consideration because we agree that active public involvement improves outcomes.'"
Santa Fe Reporter, Oct. 7, 2015:
Leaks from the Lab: LANL works to pull chromium contamination back across property line and out of aquifer
"'The fact that it's 1,000 parts per billion 3 miles from where they dumped into the canyon is kind of scary, because it seems like there might be a lot of it out there,' says Scott Kovac, operations and research director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico. 'Chromium is very soluble; it's an indicator, like a canary in a coal mine... They dumped chromium in the upper part of Sandia Canyon from the '50s to the '70s, and it's already in the aquifer, so you can't tell me that the rest of the stuff [won't get there, too].' Ultimately, for all possible contaminants still stored on site at LANL, Kovac adds, 'The conclusion has to be to remove all the sources.'"
KZFR California, September 4th 2015:
Jay Coghlan Radio Interview
(podcast link)- begins Part 1, 33 minutes in.
The Independent, Livermore, CA, August 27, 2015
Effort to Avoid Contract Competition Will Cost Sandia Corp. $4.8 Million
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico, on the other hand, stated on its blog that it 'denounces the... settlement agreement as a slap on the wrist for the world's biggest defense contractor' Lockheed Martin. It called for Lockheed Martin to be banned from future competition for Sandia's operating contract."
Sputnik News, August 25, 2015:
US Nuclear Weapons Contractor Must Pay Millions for Misuse of Federal Funds
"For Jay Coghlan, executive director of watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Sandia’s punishment amounts to 'a slap on the wrist.' 'There should be criminal prosecutions for clear violations of federal anti-lobbying laws,' he wrote on NWNM’s website. 'Lockheed Martin clearly broke the law by engaging in illegal lobbying activities to extend its Sandia contract without competition, and earned more than 100 million dollars while doing so.'"
Washington Post, August 24, 2015:
Lockheed Martin Pays $4.7 Million To Settle Charges It Lobbied For Federal Contract With Federal Money
"Friday's settlement was disparaged by bloggers critical of the national labs. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico called the deal a 'slap on the wrist for the world's biggest defense contractor to pay.'
"'Lockheed Martin clearly broke the law by engaging in illegal lobbying activities to extend its Sandia contract without competition, and earned more than 100 million dollars while doing so,' Coghlan wrote on the NuclearWatch blog, calling for criminal prosecution of the company. 'Lockheed engaged in deep and systemic corruption, including paying Congresswoman Heather Wilson $10,000 a month starting the day after she left office for so-called consulting services that had no written work requirements.'"
Center for Public Integrity, August 24, 2015:
Nuclear weapons contractor to pay millions for misuse of federal funds
By Patrick Malone
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of the nonprofit watchdog organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, called the sum Sandia Corporation agreed to pay 'a slap on the wrist.' He said 'there should be criminal prosecutions for clear violations of federal anti-lobbying laws.'"
Patrick Malone's story was also carried, with Jay's quote, in several venues, including: - Public Radio International
- TIME
- The Daily Beast
- NM Political Report
AllGov.com, August 24 2015:
Lockheed Pays Minor Penalty for Using Federal Funds to Lobby for more Federal Funds
AllGov provided a research link to the settlement agreement hosted at Nukewatch.org. "To Learn More:
- Settlement Agreement (NukeWatch.org) (pdf)"
Albuquerque Journal, August 24, 2015:
Feds fine Sandia for improper lobbying
"Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the fine was 'a slap on the wrist for the world's biggest defense contractor.' 'Lockheed Martin clearly broke the law by engaging in illegal lobbying activities to extend its Sandia contract without competition,' Coghlan said. 'There should be criminal prosecutions for clear violations of federal anti-lobbying laws, and Lockheed Martin should be barred from future competition for the Sandia Labs contract, expected next year.'"
Panel Discussion, Santa Fe, August 8, 2015:
Nuclear Weapons, Los Alamos and Nonviolence
Panel discussion on the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Bud Ryan, Jay Coghlan, Rev. Jim Lawson, Marian Naranjo, and Beata Tsosie- Pena.
Earth Matters Radio, Aug 6, 2015:
The Legacy of the US nuclear weapons program on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.
Jay Coghlan, Nukewatch Director, interview: Earth Matters Radio 89.1 FM
Huffington Post, August 5, 2015:
John Dear: Bob Dylan and America's 70-Year Nuclear Nightmare
"... On Saturday, we will hear from the leading voices of nonviolence in the nation- such as the great historian of nonviolence, Professor Erica Chenoweth; Ken Butigan, director of Campaign Nonviolence; Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence; Medea Benjamin, founder of CODEPINK; Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the HipHop Caucus; Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico; Marian Naranjo of Honor Our Pueblo Existence from the Santa Clara Pueblo, NM; Beata Tsosie-Pena from Tewa Women United in New Mexico; Dr. James Boyle, formerly of the Los Alamos National Labs; and Sister Joan Brown, an environmental activist and teacher."
Santa Fe New Mexican, July 30, 2015:
Latest audit cites more safety shortfalls at LANL
"'Los Alamos National Laboratory has been absolutely dismal about keeping its safety bases current and updated,' said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico."
Public News Service, July 15, 2015:
Udall: We Need to Understand Iran Nuclear Deal Specifics
"Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said he agrees with Udall that any agreement with any nation wanting a nuclear bomb is a good thing.
"'This has been a long dance between the United States and Iran, full of mutual recriminations and grievances,' he said. 'Let's just hope that this is a step forward towards a peaceful and potentially productive relationship.' More information on Nuclear Watch is online at nukewatch.org."
Truth Out, June 12, 2015:
Nuclear Weapons Labs Hit With Sizable Fines for New Security Violations
"'The fact that [Los Alamos National Security] didn't realize this material was missing for five years, and the unreliable nature of their review of it when they did learn about it is very disturbing,' Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit watchdog organization that tracks nuclear labs in that state, said. 'It's particularly troubling because the investigators' report says it could have had a high level of damage to national security.'"
Santa Fe New Mexican, May 1, 2015:
$73M in WIPP leak fines to pay for roadwork, other projects
"Scott Kovac of the Santa Fe-based nonprofit watchdog Nuclear Watch New Mexico also saw good and bad in the settlement. 'It’s great that the fines did not come out of LANL’s cleanup budget... ' he said in an email. 'But have the for-profit contractors that run these facilities learned anything, except that Daddy DOE will bail them out?'”
Counterpunch, April 30, 2015:
Arresting the Wrong Suspects
"The day before, Sec. of State John Kerry double-spoke to the Gen. Assembly, promising to both continue with US nuclear posturing and dream of a nuclear-free world. I skipped the puffery and listened to Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch South explain the US government’s plans for three new H-bomb factories (one each in Tenn., Kansas and New Mexico), and the building of 80 new warheads every year until 2070. In 1996, the World Court declared the NPT to be a binding legal obligation to denuclearize. We got charged with it, but it’s the US that has refused a lawful order."
Albuquerque Journal, Feb. 2, 2015
White House budget plan a mixed bag for state's labs, WIPP
"Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico said the jump in spending is 'for an agency that the Government Accountability Office has long put on its high-risk list for wasting taxpayers’ money.' He said, 'the guilty are being rewarded.' They also criticized an announcement in the
budget to spend $675 million on plans to upgrade a radiological lab facility to handle heavier grades of plutonium and another $1.4 billion to upgrade the lab's main plutonium facility. 'It’s common knowledge that NNSA's nuclear weapons programs have a staggering track record of cost overruns, schedule delays and security breaches,' Coghlan said."
Santa Fe New Mexican Jan. 18, 2015
New report by fired by LANL worker questions U.S. commitment to nonproliferation
"Last week, Doyle released a report developed in conjunction with the Santa Fe-based nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico. In the report, 'Essential Capabilities for Nuclear Security', he argues the merits of arms-control technology that he says was gaining momentum before funding efforts in Congress died. Instead, resources were diverted to building new components for aging nuclear weapons, such as the long-range campaign at Los Alamos, authorized by Congress and Obama, to produce replacement triggers at a pace not seen since the Cold War.
"'There's essentially technology with these capabilities sitting on the shelf up at Los Alamos and other national labs that haven't really been pushed out for deployment', said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico."
Public News Service, Jan. 17, 2015
Nuclear Watch NM: Government Could Spend $1 Trillion Modernizing Nukes
"Santa Fe, N.M. Nuclear Watch New Mexico says the U.S. government could spend a trillion dollars modernizing nuclear weapons that may not need modernizing.
Jay Coghlan, the watchdog group’s executive director, cites a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that projects the government could spend $355 billion updating the atomic weapons over the next decade.
Coghlan says the plan could reach the trillion-dollar mark over the next three decades.
He calls it an effort backed by the defense industry to make more money.
'And we do suggest that institutional greed is at the bottom of much of this,' he adds. 'You must remember, the nuclear-weapons complex is being run by for profit contractors.'
Coghlan points out U.S. nuclear bombs and defense strategy date back to the Cold War.
He says a modern attack would likely be similar to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, not a nuclear hit from another country.
Coghlan adds there is no point in spending a fortune modernizing weapons that research shows work just fine.
'Repeated studies have shown the existing stockpile to be even more reliable than previously thought,' he explains."
Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2015
Los Alamos lab contractor loses $57 million over nuclear waste accident
"'The size of the cut was astounding,' said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a group that scrutinizes operations at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 'It is a step in the right direction.' Coghlan said the Energy Department also reduced the duration of the management contract by one year for the consortium, which was selected in 2007 to help restore order to the lab's operations after more than a decade of security lapses, management errors and accounting scandals." This report was also carried on Phys.org entitled $57-million pay cut for lab contractor.
KVSF Santa Fe, January 9, 2015:
Jay Coghlan Radio Interview
NukeWatch executive director Jay Coghlan appeared on the Julia Goldberg Show (KVSF 101.5 FM) on January 9, speaking on the recent 90% award fee cuts against Los Alamos, as well as nuclear 'modernization' and the so-called 'second nuclear age'. Jay is on beginning at 28m 56s.
2014
Albuquerque Journal, Dec. 29, 2014
Feds slash management fee for LANL contractor
"Jay Coghlan, of the Nuclear Watch New Mexico watchdog group, said he was stunned by the fee cut and said the lab contract should be rebid now. 'LANL lives in a little bit of a fantasy world and their own echo chamber of how great they are,' he said. 'This ought to be a real wake- up call.'"
Santa Fe Reporter, Dec. 19, 2014
Labs On The Naughty List- Watchdog groups urge feds to block incentives for Sandia and LANL
"'It's an incentive to do their job well... [and] both are misbehaving more than normal' says Scott Kovac, a research director at Nuclear Watch"
LA Times, Dec. 6, 2014
Mishaps at nuke repository lead to $54 million in penalties
"Last week, the Project on Government Oversight and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, two organizations that closely monitor the Energy Department, said in a letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz that the consortium operating the Los Alamos lab should have its profits 'slashed' because of substandard performance. The two groups noted that the contractor could earn fees of up to $57 million for the fiscal year that ended in September."
KUNM, Nov. 18, 2014
Nuclear Security Expert James Doyle Talks WIPP, LANL And Non-Proliferation
"Doyle was terminated in July due to a reduction in force. He’s begun doing contract work for Nuclear Watch New Mexico in Santa Fe and the Belfer Center at Harvard University. He says the real reason he lost his job is that he had published an article challenging the logic behind nuclear weapons."
The Jicarita, October 28, 2014:
The B61 Bomb or Nonproliferation: Which Do You Prefer?
"At the end of July, the Center for Public Integrity revealed that LANL had fired James Doyle, its non-proliferation specialist. Doyle is the author of a study, "Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?", which LANL retroactively classified, although Doyle wrote it as a personal project and it remains available on the Nuclear Watch New Mexico website and other internet sites. In an October 9 press release, Nuclear Watch stated that Doyle's firing 'was widely viewed as a political move to punish an internal voice of nuclear weapons abolition.' In the report Doyle makes the argument for limiting this country's nuclear stockpile as a first step towards global disarmament.
The press release announced a new collaborative project between Doyle and Nuclear Watch to
"assess and augment the nonproliferation programs of the National Nuclear Security administration. Our ultimate goal is to redirect the focus of three national security labs from wasteful nuclear weapons research and production programs to expanded research and development of the monitoring and verification technologies needed for global abolition." Nonproliferation programs are slated for a 21 percent cut in FY 2015, and nuclear weapons dismantlements will be cut by 45 percent.
Now there's something you'd think Udall and Lujan and Heinrich would get behind instead of the B61 bomb: "the monitoring and verification technologies needed for global abolition." If they're so convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the well being of our state- particularly El Norte- is so dependent on the federal trough and the "trickle-down economics" trope, then let's keep the money rolling in for nonproliferation.."
The Guardian, September 29, 2014:
Congress pushes nuclear expansion despite accidents at weapons lab
"'We view the Obama administration's position as increasingly hypocritical,' said Jay Coghlan of New Mexico Nuclear Watch, a non-profit watchdog group. 'Obama's proposed 2015 budget is the highest ever for nuclear weapons research and production. And at the same time they're cutting nonproliferation budgets to pay for it.'"
Albuquerque Journal, August 1, 2014:
LANL fires anti-nuke article author
"Jay Coghlan, director of the watchdog group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said Doyle’s article was reposted on its website about a year ago and remains on the Nuclear Watch website. He called Doyle’s dismissal 'a clear political firing and abuse of classification procedures' in a statement issued Thursday. He demanded that federal officials reprimand the lab, reinstate Doyle, fire those responsible for his dismissal and cut award fees for Los Alamos National Security, the contractor that runs the lab, because of 'chronically poor performance and leadership'. Coghlan says that Doyle was let go because LANL didn’t like his message and sought to kill it through retroactively deciding his article contained classified information that is not supposed be released publicly."
Santa Fe New Mexican, July 31, 2014:
LANL worker says firing tied to anti-nuke article
"'The laboratory is going to regret this- mark my words- making a political firing' said Jay Coghlan, executive director of the watchdog organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
'In nuclear watchdog circles, Doyle is revered for his work verifying the drawdown in nuclear stockpiles by the United States and Russia', Coghlan said.
"Coghlan, of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which has posted an unabridged copy of the classified report on its website, nukewatch.com[sic], said the lab's treatment of Doyle raises questions about how far its administration is willing to go to silence critics of its mission to produce nuclear weapons.
"'It's absurd that the laboratory would retroactively classify Jim's report,' Coghlan said. 'Any reasonable reader would conclude that there is no classified information in the report to begin with, and secondly, it's been on the Internet for a substantial amount of time. There's no bringing it back. The laboratory is foolish in this and it's political retribution to a messenger whose message they don't like.'"
Albuquerque Journal, June 27, 2014:
State denies waste clean-up time waivers at LANL
"A watchdog group praised NMED's denial of the extensions. Nuclear Watch New Mexico said more extensive clean-up of long-term waste has been on hold because of the focus on removing the above-ground barrels. Projects to deal with more than a million cubic meters 'of all types of radioactive waste, hazardous waste, and contaminated backfill buried across the Lab were put on the back burner,' the group said.
"'After granting more than one hundred extension requests to delay cleanup, we salute the New Mexico Environment Department for denying further requests,' said Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch's executive director.
"Coghlan said his group encourages NMED 'to make LANL comply with its legally mandated cleanup order' from 2005. 'This in turn will drive increased federal funding for genuine cleanup at the lab, creating hundreds of jobs while permanently protecting our precious water and environment.'
"Nuclear Watch said LANL doesn't face any penalties for missing the Monday deadline because the 2012 agreement over removing the above-ground barrels was 'non-binding.' NMED's Winchester said via e-mail: 'Penalties/sanctions for missed deadlines and/or the June 30th deadline are still under consideration.'"
Albuquerque Journal, June 15, 2014:
Closure of WIPP Casts Long Shadow
"The lab remains under a consent order to remediate some 200,000 cubic meters of radioactive and hazardous waste in what's known as 'Area G,' some of which is believed to be transuranic, according to Scott Kovac of Santa Fe's Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
"WIPP also takes the roughly 400 cubic meters of transuranic waste Los Alamos generates annually from its work maintaining and upgrading the weapons stockpile, Kovac said.
Huntington News, May 19, 2014:
Nuclear Site Watchdogs Offer Fresh Analysis, Solutions
"Scott Kovac from Nuclear Watch New Mexico continued, 'With federal budget caps, funding hikes for nuclear weapons projects mean cuts in programs that clean up the radioactive and toxic legacy of the Cold War. As a result, environmental work at many sites is falling short of legally mandated milestones. That results in additional contamination and increased long-term costs. At the Hanford Washington site, leaking waste tanks threaten the Columbia River, and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico radioactive particles were recently released to the environment.'"
Voice of Russia US, May 1, 2014:
U.S. disguises nuclear proliferation in modernization program
Nuclear Watch reports the Department of Energy is misleading Congress
"Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch, says, 'The nuclear weapons agency of the Department of Energy is trying a new sales pitch to Congress that intentionally seeks to give the impression of lower costs. And we're talking about costs on the order of $100 billion over the next couple of decades to heavily modify existing nuclear weapons, but it's actually more on the order of $1 trillion over 30 years.'
"Adding to the price tag, the Obama administration is asking for a delay in the production of the 'interoperable' missiles [sic], which Coghlan says will inevitably add more money to the bill. As for the Life Extension Programs, Coghlan argues it's just a way for the U.S. to create new warheads by pretending to upgrade the current ones.
"'All of this is under the so-called name of modernization, which is deceptive- who can be against 'modernization'? But what is actually occurring is that the Department of Energy and the nuclear weapons labs, through this heavy modifications that they intend to take place under life extension programs for existing nuclear weapons, they're going to so heavily modify those weapons and give them new nuclear capabilities at the same time.'
"President Obama has promised to scale back the U.S.'s nuclear weapons program, but the Congressional Budget Office recently reported the U.S. plans on spending $355 billion over the next decade on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
"'For all of Obama's rhetoric, the U.S. has actually dismantled or made inactive only on the order of 300 nuclear warheads over the last four years.'"
Voice of Russia, May 1
RSN, March 25, 2014:
As Nuclear Summit Begins, Critics Slam Expansion of US Arsenal
"Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, argued in an interview last week that a reduction of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would be a step towards greater 'national security.' 'Every weapon that we retire is one less nuclear weapon waiting for an accident or that we cannot fail to keep absolutely secure,' he argues."
Ploughshares Blog, March 20, 2014:
In Desperate Need of Spring Cleaning? The US Nuclear Complex
"While the rest of the nation is concerned with shrinking budgets, incompetence among the nuclear personnel, and pullback from wars abroad, the Obama Administration's FY 2015 budget inexplicably calls for an increased nuclear weapons budget. Even more disturbingly, the Administration is calling for a decrease in programs to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and a slowdown in the dismantlement of nuclear weapons that we've already committed to destroying. To get an expert view, we talked to our grantee, Executive Director Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Here, he describes how the time is ripe for reform to the American nuclear weapons complex..."
Cibola County Beacon, March 11, 2014:
2014 Film Fest This Weekend in Grants
"... a panel discussion led by Susan Gordon, Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE) coordinator, and Scott Kovac, Nuclear Watch New Mexico operations and research director."
ABQ Journal, Feb 21 2014:
WIPP leaks 'should never occur'
"They've wanted to bring different types of waste and expand WIPP's mission and the size of WIPP," said Scott Kovac, operations and research director with Nuclear Watch New Mexico. "It's not the place. The problem is that WIPP is the only functioning geological repository in the country. What's lacking in the discussion is, what replaces WIPP?"
NukeWatch Presentation to Northern New Mexico Citizens' Advisory Board on LANL's Area G, February 12, 2014
Scott Kovac, Director of Operations for NukeWatch, gave a talk at the public meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens' Advisory Board on the problem of LANL's Area G, February 12th, 2014.
View the slide presentation (pdf)
See NukeWatch Area G Fact Sheet Updated Dec.12, 2013 (PDF)
NYTimes, Jan 20 2014:
Texas Company, Alone in US, Cashes In on Nuclear Waste
"WCS began disposing of nuclear waste in April 2012... Kovac, operations and research director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which has criticized ..."
ABQ Journal, 1/15/14:
Budget bill would boost New Mexico labs, bases
"In a statement, Jay Coghlan, president of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the increased funding for the B61 "contradict(s) Obama's rhetoric of ..."
Troy Wilde, Public News Service-NM, Jan 17 2014:
Nuclear Watch NM: Government Could Spend $1 Trillion Modernizing Nukes
"SANTA FE, N.M. – Nuclear Watch New Mexico says the U.S. government could spend a trillion dollars modernizing nuclear weapons that may not need modernizing. Jay Coghlan, the watchdog group's executive director, cites a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that projects the government could spend $355 billion updating the atomic weapons over the next decade. Coghlan says the plan could reach the trillion-dollar mark over the next three decades..." Jay Coghlan is quoted extensively in this article.
2013
Dec. 5, 2013
Jay Coghlan On Mayor Coss Radio Show on Santa Fe's KVSF-FM, discussing City Council Resolution re Area G
Nov. 6, 2013
Independence Examiner: Anti-nuclear activist speaking in Independence
"Jay Coghlan will speak in Independence on Friday night on the topic of nuclear weapons production..."
Nov. 6, 2013
POGO: New Documents Show Former Rep. Ran Through Revolving Door
"Now, new documents obtained by Nuclear Watch New Mexico director Jay Coghlan and publicized by the Albuquerque Journal reveal that Wilson left Congress on January 3, 2009, and began working for Sandia National Laboratories for $10,000 a month the very next day..."
November 1, 2013
Santa Fe New Mexican: New ideas, technologies from LANL could boost region's economy see article comments by Jay Coghlan
Oct 30, 2013
ABQJournal: Budget battles threaten U.S. nuclear modernization
"Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, a government watchdog group, said Tuesday that the potential spending spike illustrates his contention that nuclear budgets- including that of the B6- are out of control. 'Only in government can you cut tens of millions and end up adding hundreds of millions,' Coghlan said."
Jay Coghlan on the Nuclear Defense Industry
KSFR Santa Fe: Living on the Edge, October 17, 2013. David Bacon with Jay Coghlan, NukeWatch E.D. (online podcast)
More audio podcasts:
Jay Coghlan on Unicopia Radio
November 10, 2012; October 6, 2012; August 25, 2012
Oct 6, 2013
ABQJournal: Editorial: Bureaucratic ineptitude entrenched at LANL See article comments by Jay
August 1, 2013
Jay Coghlan radio interview, Santa Fe KSFR-FM
July 7, 2013
Santa Fe New Mexican: Letter to the editor
Richard Johnson (NWNM Steering Committee), re the Udall vote on the B61 upgrade.
June 28, 2013
ABQJournal: Panel OKs funds for B61 nukes
"Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said the Senate committee's decision to set B61 funding lower than Obama's request – at least unless cost and schedule benchmarks are met – was a 'victory for good governance.'"
June 18, 2013
Lease Aims at Big Savings
Maura Webber Sadovi, Wall St. Journal
The U.S. General Services Administration agreed to lease five buildings on a new 185-acre campus in Kansas City, Mo., for $61.5 million annually for the next 20 years.
"Critics of the nuclear agency such as Jay Coghlan, director of Nuke Watch New Mexico, said the agency should have consolidated the Kansas City workers at one of its other sites. The NNSA's other sites include the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Mr. Coghlan, whose group has pushed for the U.S. to reduce its nuclear-weapons complex, said it more efficient to own given the long life span of such sites. 'After 20 years, the NNSA is throwing money away to private developers', Mr. Coghlan said."
May 17, 2013
Larry Barker KRQE TV report w. interview Jay Coghlan. (video) / NWNM press release (PDF)
March 15, 2013
NNSA outlines steps taken to improve safety culture at Pantex
By Greg Rohloff, The Amarillo Independent
During a daylong hearing on concerns over safety at Pantex, Dr. Peter S. Winokur, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, addressed an array of National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Thursday and noted that, of all the facilities in the nuclear weapons complex, Pantex is the one he considered to be the gold standard for safety.
"And while questions continually came back to meeting production goals versus stressing safety, no one on the board asked the obvious one, raised in the public comments of the afternoon session by Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Kovac noted that the nine-page document listing the criteria for awarding the 2013 performance bonus did not list safety as a criteria. Nor did anyone ask if the perception that workers were unappreciated was triggered more by general economic conditions of high unemployment and a constant push for reductions in government spending in Washington, than by the actual relationship with managers."
March 12, 2013
NNSA Defends Contract Extensions but Congressional Scrutiny Expected
Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire
"The National Nuclear Security Administration is defending itself against charges that it renewed lucrative deals for undeserving contractors, but the issue is likely to come up at congressional oversight hearings in the coming months, sources say.
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico said last week that earning at least 80 percent of an 'at-risk incentive award fee is the threshold for eligibility for a one-year contract extension' at NNSA sites. The firm that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico 'received only 68 percent of its possible at-risk award fee of $46.5 million for the last budget year, primarily because of cost overruns that ballooned a security project from $213 million to $254 million,' according to a press release from the organization.
"Nonetheless, Neile Miller, then the agency's top award determining official and now its acting chief, overrode a decision by NNSA site personnel and granted Los Alamos National Security a waiver that extends its contract through fiscal 2018, the group said.
"According to Nuclear Watch, a similar situation occurred regarding the contract of a consortium- consisting of Bechtel National, the University of California, Babcock and Wilcox, the Washington Division of URS and Battelle- that manages the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Lawrence Livermore National Security earned 78 percent of its 'available at-risk incentive fee, still short of the gateway of 80 percent,' the group said.
'However, acting NNSA Administrator Neile Miller overrode that too, giving the lab contractor an extra $541,527 to help it meet the 80 percent mark and extending the management contract another year.'
"Nuclear Watch New Mexico cited the spiraling cost of the Los Alamos security system for its Technical Area 55 as one of a number of NNSA projects in which expenses have exceeded projections. The organization said that to avoid future cost overruns, the government should emphasize conservative life-extension programs for nuclear warheads that do not involve the creation of new military capabilities. In addition to costing more, introducing "untested changes to existing nuclear weapons" could "erode confidence in their reliability," the group suggested. Congress should also "pull the plug on exorbitant failed projects" such as Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility and an unfinished plant for turning nuclear-weapon plutonium into reactor fuel at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the group says."
February 15, 2013
Nuclear Lab Remains Vulnerable to Cyberstrikes: DOE Inspector General
Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire
"Among the issues identified in the latest report . . . Computer network servers and systems featured “easily guessed log-in credentials or required no authentication. For example, 15 web applications and five servers were configured with default or blank passwords."
"I'm concerned that sensitive data at LANL could be at risk, given the lab's past security scandals and still unresolved cyber security issues," Jay Coghlan, executive director of the watchdog organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico, stated by e-mail. "After all of the security problems and exploding cost overruns all across NNSA's nuclear weapons complex, Congress should be mandating strict federal oversight and demanding greater return on taxpayers' dollars from contractors by requiring them to meet specific performance goals."
January 17, 2013
NNSA Override of recommendation raises questions
Watchdogs react to 'waiver' -By John Severance
Reaction has been a bit slow but watchdog groups are weighing in on the National Nuclear Security Administration's decision that gave the Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a one-year contract extension through a one-time waiver. According to documents obtained by the Los Alamos Monitor, the lab originally was not awarded a one-year contract extension. But acting NNSA administrator Neile Miller reversed the recommendation.
Scott Kovac, Nuclear Watch NM Program director commented, "By getting these performance evaluations released publicly, Nuclear Watch expects that outraged taxpayers will demand more NNSA oversight and an end to the federal government paying the usual nuclear weapons contractors millions without enforcing performance accountability. Nuke Watch is going back to Congress to demand that it require measurable performance benchmarks before enriching the nuclear weapons contractors. In these tough economic times Americans should expect nothing less."
Los Alamos, the Atomic City, is facing a legacy of its nickname.
The contractor in charge of cleaning up Los Alamos National Laboratory’s legacy waste will receive the lowest percentage of its yearly bonus in its four years at the lab, mainly because of deficiencies in worker safety and packaging waste for shipping.
BY JAY COGHLAN
Jay Coghlan, Executive Director @ Nuclear Watch New Mexico, on tactical nukes in the Ukraine war with Russia, the deterrent factor, PIT manufacturing in Los Alamos and other related topics.
Jay Coghlan, Director @ Nuclear Watch New Mexico, on public hearings and the comment period on the expansion of the “Pit” building program at LANL.
SANTA FE — While the Department of Energy says that a cyberoffensive was limited to business networks, concerns remain about the depth of the breach and what threat it could still pose to national security and New Mexico’s two national laboratories.
In response to (the Aug. 13) editorial “Archbishop’s nuclear weapons view needs a homily on reality,” I was one of the speakers at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, organized by Fr. John Dear, at which Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester eloquently spoke. The editorial declared “neither Wester nor Dear appear to accept the premise there is any deterrent benefit to the nuclear arsenal.”
The U.S. bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Although nuclear weapons haven’t been used in combat since, they continue to proliferate across the globe. This week, two activists from New Mexico explain the lesser known costs of the production of nuclear weapons…
