New Mexico Environment Secretary James C. Kenney speaks Sunday at the 4th Annual Trinity Test Commemoration event at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com

BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

New Mexico Environment Department Sec. James Kinney was the guest speaker at Sunday’s annual Trinity Test Commemoration at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe, and was expected to outline the department’s efforts to hold the federal government accountable for cleanup efforts and the protection of New Mexico’s water resources.

Other speakers were Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus at Northern Arizona University; Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico; and Tina Cordova, Co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. The event is organized by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, Back from the Brink New Mexico Hub, Interfaith Power and Light New Mexico, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Soka Gakkai International-USA, and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

Later in the afternoon when it was Secretary Kenney’s turn to speak, he recognized that 81 years ago with the Trinity Test, New Mexico and the world changed in “a moment of non-consent, a moment that nobody knew was coming”. He said it changed the trajectory of communities like Los Alamos and all over the state of New Mexico, who are dealing with the fallout of what transpired.

While pointing NMED staff members in the audience who had chosen to attend the event, Kenney said he wanted to be really clear that the Environment Department staff fully recognizes that their past is their call to action. He called those employees the community’s last bastion to hold the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration accountable.

“We don’t feel like they’ve been held accountable and we do want them to be accountable to all of you, to all of us. My team lives here, you live here, I live here. We’re not going anywhere. We want to be safe in the way we drink water, eat food, outdoor recreation, cultural practices for Native American communities – all that needs to be honored in the way that DOE has not honored that in the past,” Kenney said.

He said that at a meeting in Washington, DC recently with DOE, they told him they wanted to make sure they hear his concerns.

“We feel as though you’re very unhappy with us”, I said, ‘This is not about feelings. When are we talking about feelings; this is about money. If you show me the numbers for legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos moved to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. You show me numbers that you’re investing in New Mexico and I’ll show you some feelings, but until that time, you have the feelings that I have, which are that I’m really annoyed and I’m really bothered. I’m going to say to say it again. This isn’t about feelings – in some ways it is a lot about feelings in this room – but when it comes to legacy waste cleanup it’s not about feelings – it’s about moving the waste from Los Alamos and getting it into WIPP,” Kenney said.

He went on to “tell some stories”, because when people read NMED letters or read a headline, they’re “not getting what we’re talking about internally”.

“I want to fill the gaps in for you so that you get a better sense of who we are and why we are doing what we’re doing. The first thing is I’ve had about 12 different site managers from Los Alamos and Carlsbad sitting in my office in Santa Fe telling me they’re going to do the right thing, with a team of people who haven’t changed in the last 7 1/2 years,” Kenney said. “We can smell when there’s something rotten, when there’s something that needs to be taken out in the trash.”

He noted that what bothers him is when people come to his office and tell him, “We want to do the right thing by you”.

“Well, riddle me this. Why has LANL’s environmental budget dropped $50 million in the last few years. So if you’re going to tell me you’re committed to Los Alamos but the budget tells me you’re not committed to Los Alamos. $50 million reduction in cleanup money. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t find that to be honest,” Kenney said. “I also don’t find it to be honest where DOE-Los Alamos had their contractor N3B and in 2021 they withheld spending $120 million on cleanup and rolled it into the next fiscal year.”

Kenney said there’s a money problem in Los Alamos for cleanup.

“So now you can get behind the story of, ‘It’s technically difficult to cleanup Los Alamos waste’. I’m an engineer. We can get into the technically difficult aspects of things. I’m okay with that. But don’t tell me it’s a technical problem when it’s a money problem. I’m inquisitive. Why is there a money problem? What’s happening – that’s a fair question,” he said.

Kenney went on to recall another “little side story” from November 6, 2019, saying he was at a gas station in Clines Corners filling up a state car when he got a call from Washington, DC.

“They say, ‘We’re letting you know that tomorrow we’re signing a settlement with Idaho National Labs that 55 percent of all the waste in the country will come from Idaho for the foreseeable future’. I said, ‘I may be at Clines Corners where there’s a lot of wind, but did you just say 55 percent of the waste is going to come from Idaho and not Los Alamos?’ I said, ‘New Mexico would like to be a party to that settlement, because we disagree’. And they said, ‘Well, we’re announcing it tomorrow. You’re too late’. I said, ‘How am I too late, you just called me?’,” Kenney said.

He said it really bothered him the way the Department of Energy is treating New Mexico.

“To go to 55 percent. When I tell you the budget for Los Alamos has dropped, it’s dropped because they’re surging cleanup in other states. They started surging cleanup in Idaho and then they’re going to surge cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington next. I’m really bothered that I’m hearing about things that were done in backroom deals and not with us,” Kenney said. “One of the ways I talk to DOE is, ‘You perceive that all roads lead to WIPP; not here in New Mexico. We perceive all roads lead from WIPP, and until you involve New Mexico in every single conversation about every single generator site around the country, you have the wrong people to deal with. Until we’re at the table, you have nobody at the table”.

“Here we are under this notion that DOE is not appropriating enough money to LANL. They’ve sided with deals going to Idaho and other states. Around that time, we also had renegotiated the Consent Order, which is the cleanup order for Los Alamos, to put more teeth into it. That has become a problem, and you can guess why it’s a problem. How do you comply with a Consent Order to clean up Los Alamos when your budget is being syphoned with signed agreements with other states? It’s not a genuine moment to sign agreements with other states or sign a Consent Order with New Mexico, knowing you’re not going to be able to honor the commitment you’re making to New Mexico or to the Environment Department,” Kenney said. “So we have multiple enforcement actions related to things like the hexavalent chromium plume at Los Alamos, but when it comes to the legacy waste, we should hold all the cards. We have the only waste repository in the entire country. We agreed as a state to host the nation’s only waste repository; good bad or ugly this is where we are. And yet most of the waste going to WIPP is not coming from New Mexico’s legacy sites like Los Alamos.”

He asked how does New Mexico accept the risk to put that waste repository in New Mexico if the waste is coming from “everywhere else in the country but our own back yards”.

It’s insulting – you should be infuriated. I am very angry,” Kenney said.

He noted that when suddenly the WIPP permit came up for its 10-year renewal, NMED, along with many of the advocacy groups in the room, said they would agree that providing WIPP would focus on legacy waste and build a panel dedicated just to cleanup of legacy waste, and provided DOE would agree to prioritize Los Alamos, the permit could be renewed.

“I’m still mad about the call I got in Clines Corners. I’m still mad at our budget cuts but we thought this was going to fix it. Guess what? It didn’t fix it. Here’s why. And this is the part where it’s really crystalized for me. In 2023 is when we reviewed the permit and had these conditions added,” Kenney said.

He alleged that in 2022, DOE signed a contract for a new company to come in and manage WIPP.

“That contract is with a company called Salida Isolation Mining Contractors, LLC, a $3 billion, multiple year contract that does two things and we should be pissed off about this contract. It said initially, the Department of Energy/SIMCO should build capital projects at WIPP to improve its operation and doing those capital projects like ventilator shafts (those are good for workers by the way), they slowed down shipments to WIPP. We’re already behind Idaho, we’ve already lost money in Los Alamos and now we’re doing capital projects that are going to slow down shipments. We’re losing three times now and then on top of that, once the capital projects are finished, the priority or the way you profit if you’re SIMCO – the way you profit off the Department of Energy – is you move the easiest way first – NSAA waste, pit production waste, waste from Idaho, waste from Hanford, Washington state – you move all this other waste,” Kenney said. “The contract favors profit over waste.”

He said in 2023, the Department of Energy said they agreed that legacy waste at LANL would be the priority.

“They knew what they signed in 2022 – we didn’t. So now the WIPP permit is out there. LANL’s budget starts getting cut. We start seeing less waste coming from Los Alamos. DOE was shipping more waste from LANL to WIPP before the contract was signed, before the WIPP permit renewal. And then after we prioritized legacy waste from Los Alamos cleanup, it fell off precipitously,” Kenney said. “If you think about that – is this the fact that we have multiple administrations at the federal level changing? Is this the fact that they have 12 different site managers changing compared to our sort of being here. I don’t think happenstance here. I think this was a concerted effort to leave Los Alamos folks high and dry as they pivot from legacy waste cleanup to pit production.”

He said DOE has a very small trajectory that they just aren’t explaining to NMED.

“But guess what, we figured it out. And that’s why in the early part of this year, in April, we initiated a WIPP permit modification on the day that we announced that we were issuing three enforcement actions at Los Alamos. We have about $16 million penalty out there for hexavalent chromium moving onto San Ildefonso Pueblo. We’re issuing the WIPP permit change to have more teeth and more accountability, to not just let them decide over the course of the evening to just say that MDA C, an 11-acre landfill with all sorts of chemicals and low-level radioactive waste in it went from inactive status to active because it’s next to where they want to invest in doing their pit production.:

Kenney said. “We’re on to them. We see it. It’s bright as day. The sun is shining bright, and we see everything that’s happening – that we’re intersecting, interrupting, showing up, doing the work it takes to hold them accountable.”

Kenney told attendees that NMED wants to work with them to make sure that their hopes and dreams and not solely their fears about the future are recognized in the actions NMED is taking to stand up a Department of Energy that values being in the state of New Mexico.

” It is an honor for them to be here. So if they want to be here, then they need to abide by a. putting New Mexicans first, putting New Mexico first,” he said. “What can we do better? It’s math, guys; move more waste, amp the budget up, stop signing up for things in New Mexico that you can’t live up to.”

This is not going to happen on our watch as a citizen or as a government and we’re going to fight back on these issues.

What can we do better? It’s math, guys; move more waste, amp the budget up, stop signing up for things in New Mexico that you can’t live up to.

Do you all know that they wanted to bring in Russian americium and store it at WIPP? You come to New Mexico and stand on a stage and explain that to New Mexicans, because I want to be in the audience for that conversation. It’s a non-starter for us. I think you called the wrong number. Governor has given me full authority and supports the work NMED is doing, so we don’t plan to leave the administration without a foundational change in how the federal government is doing business in our state.

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Your money in New Mexico is going not for cleanup but to fight against cleanup. Blaming us at the Environment Department to doing the things you committed to do.

One of his fears is how DOE and NNSA changes around with different presidential moments – they might be investing in Los Alamos today for pit production, but will they be exporting all of those jobs out of the state . We have Manhattan Project waste, Cold War waste, are we going to have more waste as they sort of move the production back to South Carolina. I’m not advocating for more pit production here. The Environment Department doesn’t have a lot of regulatory authority under the Atomic Energy Act to do much about pit production. We do have a lot of authority when it comes to WIPP and our ace in the hole is actually the way they operate is they keep putting us last. The more we’re talking about and understanding this really complex issue. Why are Idaho and Washington ahead of us. We’re hosting the only repository. Why do you keep on signing things? Why do you keep on cutting budgets? Why do you have a company making profit off keeping waste in the ground at Los Alamos?