Editorial: Pete, Jeff, Tom: fight for LANL cleanup

Sens. Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, along with Rep Tom Udall of the House Appropriations Committee, should insist on all the dollars it will take to clean LANL's fouled nest.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, long resistant to the idea of cleaning up the mess it made ending World War II and waging the Cold War, is catching it from many sides in today's comparative peacetime:

The $3 trillion federal budget President Bush sent to Congress this week is big on defense spending, but skimps on environmental remediation.

That's no surprise, considering its source. But LANL's leaders have committed the lab to cleanup agreements with their host state of New Mexico. And they're an understandable target of lawsuits from folks whose water is being contaminated to one degree or another from high-risk operations up on Pajarito Mesa.

Yesterday, a coalition of enviros filed a federal lawsuit saying the lab is responsible for what they say is significant contamination flowing into our region's water. LANL, say a bunch of plaintiff organizations, is out of compliance with federal pollution-discharge permits at 59 stormwater sites.

Every time it rains or snows, they contend, six decades' worth of contamination — radioactive or otherwise hazardous — rushes or seeps toward the Río Grande. Things have gotten worse, says the suit, in the wake of the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000.

Lab experts no doubt will refute some of the figures — but recent administrations on "the Hill" have recognized that things weren't shipshape during the scramble for an atomic bomb and the pressure for more and bigger nuclear weapons in the 40-year arms race that followed.

The thinking for years, echoed by generations of congressional delegates, was that national security — defined as often by politicians as by military brass — trumped the environmental concerns of a largely empty state.

But it appears people are here to stay — most of us along the big river that sustains many of our main cities, towns and farms.

Three years ago, LANL and the Energy Department struck an agreement with New Mexico's dogged environmental secretary, Ron Curry: fence-to-fence cleanup of the lab's 40 square miles by 2015 if the state will stop bugging them.

That's a tall order, even if there are big stretches where environmentally blithe scientists didn't dump leftover concoctions of chemicals, heavy metals and who-knows-what-all ingredients of diabolical weapons calculated to bring the commies to their knees.

The $164 million the White House has budgeted for cleanup might be a lot of money to most folks — but lab leaders said last fall that it would take $222 million this year to stay on pace.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman already is acknowledging that LANL and other nuclear facilities "will miss a number of milestones." Failure to meet them means state fines — which the lab's leading defender, Sen. Pete Domenici, says might be unreasonable at times. But Domenici, to his credit, told Bodman he hopes the department will come up with a way to funnel "sufficient money for cleanup."

Curry, meanwhile, is standing his ground: A promise is a promise, he said again this week — and he's not going to let the federal government back away from it.

The suit was filed by the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of Amigos Bravos, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, the Southwest Organizing Project and two acequia organizations — among others.

The plaintiffs claim the lab is failing to monitor, report and control pollution. They want LANL ordered to comply with the conditions of the permits.

Lab lawyers might argue mightily that their client is complying. They're likely to offer all kinds of evidence to bolster their case — and maybe, for some past period, it'll hold up. But if LANL isn't given the money its own bosses say it needs for the fiscal year starting next fall, they'll have a long future in federal courtrooms.

Sens. Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, along with Rep Tom Udall of the House Appropriations Committee, should insist on all the dollars it will take to clean LANL's fouled nest.