Citizen Action NM to Sue Sandia National Labs on Mixed Waste Landfill Illegalities

From Citizen Action NM:
Citizen Action New Mexico, an Albuquerque-based public interest group, today filed a Notice of Intent to Sue charging that state and federal regulators for the Mixed Waste Landfill (MWL) at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), allowed the illegal operation of the MWL. This included the failure to enforce the requirement to have federal permits and failure to properly monitor the ground water underneath the dump. The notice names the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Defense (DOD), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Lockheed Martin Corporation.

The Mixed Waste Landfill, a Cold War legacy waste dump containing an estimated 100,000 cubic ft. of radioactive and hazardous waste, is situated on the East Mesa at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico and operated from 1959 to 1988. Citizen Action contends that years of data collected from monitoring wells at the MWL are unreliable and do not justify the NMED’s approval of a permit that will allow DOE/SNL to place a vegetative cover over the dump. Citizen Action maintains that excavation of the dump’s toxic wastes is the only sure way to protect Albuquerque’s drinking water.

The legal notice states that the Mixed Waste Landfill represents an imminent and substantial endangerment to the Albuquerque’s sole source aquifer that underlies the dump’s hazardous and radioactive wastes.  The notice alleges that the NMED failed to impose permitting, closure and groundwater monitoring requirements under a federal law known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).  RCRA requires that hazardous landfill operations either had to have permits to operate legally or the dump should have been closed to provide maximum protection to the public. Citizen Action contends the NMED and EPA failed to take corrective action against DOE/Sandia for known violations and deficiencies at the dump.

The 36-page notice examines the legal permitting history of the Mixed Waste Landfill from over 20,000 pages of administrative records from a public hearing conducted for the dump in December, 2004. The administrative record shows that the dump operated illegally by disposing of hazardous wastes without obtaining a permit required under RCRA.  RCRA provides for criminal prosecution where there is knowledge that disposal of hazardous waste is taking place when there is no federal permit.

Legal charges of DOE/Sandia’s criminal wrongdoing involve falsification of records by purging and destruction; violations of manifest and record keeping requirements; the knowing transportation of hazardous waste to an unpermitted dump; and lateral expansion of the dump without providing lined trenches with leachate collection.

Dave McCoy, Director of Citizen Action said, “The NMED has allowed the DOE and Sandia to avoid compliance with strict federal legal regulations designed to protect the community from toxic contamination of drinking water supplies.  This has resulted in millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on improper installation of monitoring wells at a legacy waste site.  Both the NMED and DOE/SNL have relied on flawed data from the monitoring wells to claim that Albuquerque’s drinking water will remain safe for years to come.  However, since the monitoring wells at the dump were installed improperly and are incapable of detecting contamination, there is no accurate information about the status of contamination at the Mixed Waste Landfill to make an informed decision. The safest course of action is to excavate the waste and install proper monitoring wells as required by law.”

McCoy added that similar waste sites have been successfully removed from other locations at Sandia, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and other locations without injuring workers or causing dangerous public exposures.

The administrative record puts the EPA and NMED on record in the early 1990s in stating that the well monitoring system at the dump was not in compliance with federal law:

• “The monitoring system is inadequate;” 
• “The monitoring wells are located crossgradient instead of downgradient from the MWL; therefore, contaminants emanating from the MWL may not be detected in the monitoring wells;” 
• “The hydraulic conductivity of the aquifer is unknown;”
• The mud drilling technology used for several of the wells was “considered to be the worse [sic] drilling technology available.”

Despite the deficient well monitoring, neither the NMED nor the EPA took action to require the monitoring wells to be correctly installed in proper locations to comply with federal law.  Instead, the regulators continued to rely on data from the wells which they knew to be spurious.

Citizen Action is a project of the New Mexico Community Foundation and a member of the New Mexicans for Sustainable Energy and Effective Stewardship (NMSEES). Contact: Dave McCoy  dave@radfreenm.org