BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
Members of the 285 Alliance are set to protest from 4:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 10 at SALA Event Center in Los Alamos just prior to a Department of Energy Environmental Management Cleanup public forum to update the community on work underway to address legacy waste inventories at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
DOE-EM’s publicity for the forum, which will run from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., says it will feature discussions on the different waste streams being managed by N3B Los Alamos as part of the LANL legacy cleanup, the corrective action process for legacy waste, from generation to preparing waste for shipment, and key accomplishments of the cleanup program.
Speakers will include representatives from EM-LA, N3B and the DOE Carlsbad Field Office, which manages the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Cynthia Weehler, Co-Chair of 285 Alliance, told the Los Alamos Reporter Monday that the group’s Fire On The Mountain campaign is protesting DOE’s claim that it is safely handling the nuclear weapons waste that it is required to cleanup at LANL.
“DOE’s mismanagement of the cleanup can be gauged by the amount of Cold War waste still at LANL. This waste would be much safer in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), which was built to hold it. Instead, DOE plans to put legacy waste from other sites and newly-generated waste into the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in Carlsbad WIPP before removing this legacy waste from LANL,” Weehler said.
She said attending the protest will be the group’s mascot, “DOEzo The Clown”, to show “how clownishly the DOE “mismanages the very waste it generates”.
285 Alliance is not happy with DOE’s plan to “release up to 30,000 curies of radioactive tritium gas that was left so long in drums that it’s in danger of exploding”.
According to Weehler, DOE claims “it will take decades to move 2,500 unlabeled drums of radioactive waste that sit in canvas tents at LANL in a wildfire zone.”
The 285 Alliance is citizens’ group focused on nuclear safety and community well-being along Hwy 285 as well as the expansion of WIPP.