DOE: Cleanup Fund Will Pay WIPP fines
By Mark Oswald / Journal Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 12:05 am
SANTA FE – The federal Department of Energy is taking the position that any state fines it pays for a radioactive leak at the nation’s nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad will come from money appropriated to clean up decades’ worth of contamination from nuclear weapons work in New Mexico.
“Any fines and penalties assessed on the EM (environmental management) program would be provided by cleanup dollars, resulting in reduced funding for cleanup activities,” says a 2016 budget year summary presented earlier this month by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
The New Mexico Environment Department has fined the DOE $54 million for the leak from a drum of radioactive waste processed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The drum ruptured in February 2014 and has shut down the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Project, halting delivery of waste from Los Alamos and other weapons complex sites to the underground facility.
http://www.abqjournal.com/544613/news/doe-cleanup-fund-will-pay-wipp-fines.html
3 comments:
“Any fines and penalties assessed on the EM (environmental management) program would be provided by cleanup dollars, resulting in reduced funding for cleanup activities,” (DOE)
Have the layoff lists been prepared at LANL to compensate for the funding that will be transferred to the State of New Mexico to pay these massive fines?
It is time for NM to realize that dependence on federal government money for jobs is a losing game. Cold turkey time.
The original NMED letter to DOE imposing the $54M fine for failures at WIPP included the following: "New Mexico will not tolerate any attempts by DOE to divert resources from the environmental or operational budget at the federal facilities in our state to pay for the penalties assessed in the attached Order." Sounds like DOE still doesn't get it,
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