[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION, DISPOSAL: "Bureaucratic Stagnation Over Removal of Sandia National Laboratory [NM] Mixed Waste"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Bureaucratic Stagnation Over Removal of Sandia National Laboratory Mixed Waste 

By KAY MATTHEWS
La Jicarita (NM)
August 29, 2020


La Jicarita has been covering Sandia National Laboratory’s Mixed Waste Landfill in Albuquerque since 2013, especially the concerns raised by Dave McCoy, director of Citizen Action New Mexico. McCoy has been trying to get the Lab and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), which is responsible for oversight of the radioactive and chemical wastes in the landfill, to excavate the waste and transfer it offsite. Instead, since 2009, the waste has been covered with a layer of dirt that McCoy and many others believe inadequately protects the aquifer from which Albuquerque gets its drinking supply. In 2015 testimony regarding the landfill, Dr. Michael Barcelona, Ph.D., a professor of chemistry and member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, stated: “The [MixedWaste Landfill] cover will not last sufficient time considering the persistence for millennia of the Mixed Waste Landfill contents. The use of a dirt cover without a liner beneath the cover and the waste is completely worthless.”

From 1959 to 1989, Sandia dumped between 100,000 and 1.5 million cubic feet of toxic and radioactive waste in a shallow, unlined pit a few hundred feet above the aquifer. The New Mexico Environment Department issued Sandia a conditional permit to store those wastes on-site in 2005 that required Sandia to consider a plan to extract and remove the waste (5-year repeated reports are required to examine the feasibility of extraction).

…

For the entire article, see
https://lajicarita.wordpress.com/2020/08/29/bureaucratic-stagnation-over-removal-of-sandia-national-laboratory-mixed-waste/

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org





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