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DOE official says LANL cleanup picked up pace; monitoring shows hexavalent chromium above state standard in new well samples
Summary
Jessica Kunkel, DOE EM Los Alamos field office manager, told county council that FY2025 legacy‑waste shipments rebounded and exceeded targets but zonal sampling at a new monitoring well on Pueblo de San Ildefonso land found a high of 73 µg/L for hexavalent chromium (state standard 50 µg/L); DOE said monthly sampling and adaptive management will follow.
Jessica Kunkel, manager of the Department of Energy Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, briefed the Los Alamos County Council on December 16, saying the office has accelerated legacy‑waste shipments and is pressing to refine monitoring and remediation for a hexavalent chromium groundwater plume.
"We actually rebounded quite significantly in fiscal year 2025 and actually exceeded all of our waste shipping metrics last fiscal year," Kunkel told the council, saying Los Alamos shipped about 193.4 cubic meters of transuranic waste in FY2025 versus a target of 62 cubic meters. She described steps to process "process containers" so some can be classified as low‑level waste and routed to alternative disposal while the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) undergoes a planned outage in FY2027.
Kunkel spent most of her presentation on a chromium plume first detected in 2004 at concentrations above New Mexico's groundwater standard of 50 micrograms per liter. The plume lies beneath Mortandad and Sandia Canyons and, at mapped depths so far, extends roughly 1 mile long and a half‑mile wide. DOE has installed dozens of monitoring points and is coordinating with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the Office of the State Engineer and Pueblo de San Ildefonso.
She described results from zonal sampling while installing SIMR3 (San Ildefonso Mortandad Regional monitoring well 3), a previously agreed‑upon data gap well on Pueblo land. Of five zonal samples, Kunkel said the lowest measured concentration was 18.6 µg/L and the highest was 73 µg/L, which exceeds the state standard. She cautioned that zonal sampling can be disturbed by drilling and that monthly sampling after well completion is required to establish a long‑term trend.
Kunkel summarized recommendations from an expert technical review team, which urged restarting interim pump‑and‑treat measures, transitioning modeling to Modflow and improving the conceptual site model, drilling additional monitoring wells to fill data gaps, implementing adaptive site management in coordination with NMED and the Pueblo, and using dual‑screen wells where authorized.
She also recounted the interim measure history: operations began in 2018, injection was stopped by NMED in March 2023, partially resumed in September 2024 with a reduced configuration, and NMED instructed cessation of injection again on Nov. 18, 2025. Kunkel said DOE's empirical data show interim operations reduced chromium concentrations and that the office is discussing a partial restart or reconfiguration with NMED.
During questions, Councilor Wright and others pressed DOE on inventory trends, access controls around Material Disposal Areas and the timeline to establish monthly sampling trends. Brad Smith, president and general manager of N3B, said security layers and monitoring are in place at TA‑21 and other locations and that some facilities will remain on the demolition list. DOE staff committed to follow up on specific inventory comparisons between areas and on several technical follow‑ups requested by councilors.
What's next: DOE expects SIMR3 well installation to finish in spring 2026 and to begin monthly sampling afterward to establish trends; DOE and NMED plan additional joint public meetings on FY2026 consent‑order activities. The county's regulators and the Pueblo have authority over data release from wells on Pueblo land and DOE said such data are subject to an agreed 60‑day review period by the Pueblo prior to public release.
