Aug. 21—State and federal officials said Monday they were open to having a mediator help them work through an impasse on how to clean up a decades-old toxic chromium plume under Los Alamos National Laboratory that poses a threat to a nearby pueblo.
State regulators in March ordered the U.S. Energy Department to stop extracting tainted water, treating it and injecting it back into the 1.5-mile-long plume to dilute the pollution, contending this approach pushed the contaminants toward San Ildefonso Pueblo and deeper into the aquifer.
Federal officials insist the pump-and-treat method is reducing the hexavalent chromium and creating a "hydraulic barrier" to keep it from spreading to the pueblo, but in April the agency complied with the state's order to stop injecting treated water back into aquifer.
Now the contamination is rebounding, and by winter is likely to erase any gains the agency made in a large part of the aquifer in the past 3 1/2 years, a DOE cleanup manager told the Legislature's Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee on Monday.
"Since we've stopped that hydraulic barrier, the chromium plume is continuing to move and recontaminating the aquifer that we've cleaned," said Michael Mikolanis, head of DOE's environmental management in Los Alamos.
But Rick Shean, the state Environment Department's director of resource protection, said the monitoring wells showed the injections were not containing the pollutants or pulling them back as Mikolanis described but instead were pushing them outward.
State Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces, asked them if they would consider bringing in a third party to offer a different viewpoint and help settle their differences — to which they both replied "yes."
Mikolanis said the Energy Department has offered a grant to pay for an independent analyst, adding though it's federal funding, this person would be neutral.
Steinborn recommended to Shean the state accept the federal government's offer to fund a third set of eyes on the project.
It's crucial the agencies move past their deadlock as soon as possible so they can tackle a serious environmental problem that will only worsen if cleanup is delayed, he said.
"We have two regulating entities that want to do the right thing — I believe that," Steinborn said. "But they don't agree on the right approach, they don't necessarily agree on the problem."
The panel then voted to send a formal letter to both agencies requesting they hire a mediator to assess the data and help resolve the dispute.