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In light of New Mexico’s “stay at home order” in effect until at least April 30 and Los Alamos County guidelines and the restrictions associated with the order, the LALT Board of Directors decided at its April 7, 2020 meeting to cancel the remainder of the 2019-2020 season through the end of May.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Feb. 8, 2021—New numbers for fiscal year 2020 show Los Alamos National Laboratory’s big impact on New Mexico’s economy, as the Laboratory employed 12,367 people for a total of $1.24 billion in salaries and contracted with small businesses statewide for $413 million.

“Los Alamos National Laboratory is a major economic driver in the region, and we are committed to strengthening local companies and growing the local workforce,” said Thom Mason, Laboratory director. “Perhaps the most admirable gain in FY20 was our contracts with New Mexico small businesses, which were up 43 percent. I am confident we will build on these efforts in 2021.”

The Laboratory increased its procurement contracts with New Mexico small businesses by 43 percent in FY 2020 to $413 million. Among its contractors is Española-based Performance Maintenance Incorporated, which also won the U.S. Department of Energy Award for HUB-Zone Small Business of the Year.

Buying from New Mexico businesses

In FY 2020, which ended September 30, the Laboratory spent $413 million in procurement contracts with New Mexico small businesses, a record for the Laboratory. Many of which are categorized as disadvantaged, women-owned, veteran owned, and HUB-zone located.

Specifically:

• Disadvantaged: $143,490,437
• Women-owned: $140,089,376
• HUB zone-located: $49,616,022
• Veteran-owned: $17,152,756

In the coming years, the Laboratory intends to expand on the above categories as it works toward aggressive goals in collaborating with more small businesses.

Employment

With 57 percent of Laboratory employees living outside of Los Alamos County, they spend much of their salaries—a collective $608.7 million­­—in their home communities.

Employee salaries by county:

• Los Alamos County: $631 million
• Santa Fe County: $301 million
• Rio Arriba County: $140.5 million
• Bernalillo County: $43 million
• Sandoval County: $40.6 million
• Taos County: $14 million
• Other: $69.6 million

In FY 2020, the number of Laboratory employees reached 12,367, up from 12,041 in FY 2019. As of the end of FY 2020, 40 percent of Laboratory employees were native New Mexicans.

Economic development

Each year, the Laboratory invests and partners in economic development initiatives that stimulate business growth, create jobs, and strengthen communities—particularly those in the seven counties surrounding the Laboratory. In particular, the New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program enables small businesses to solve technical challenges by pairing them with free subject-matter experts and cutting-edge technologies at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.

Since the start of economic development programs in 2001, NMSBA has:

• Conducted 7,315 projects with New Mexico small businesses
• Attracted $353.6 million in new financing
• Created or retained 12,199 non-Laboratory jobs with salaries totaling $465.3 million

For nearly two decades, workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of hexavalent chromium, an anti-corrosive used in the cooling towers at the lab’s power plant, into Sandia Canyon. The chemical migrated into Mortidad Canyon and seeped nearly 1,000 feet underground to rest in the regional aquifer.

But in the nearly 14 years since the lab discovered the highly carcinogenic contamination, and the 13 years since the New Mexico Environment Department pledged to take “aggressive action” to clean it up, little has been done to reduce the size or spread of the plume, creeping ever closer to Los Alamos County’s water supply.

That glacial pace of cleanup is not uncommon for industrial pollution in New Mexico. Chemically contaminated areas regularly take several decades to clean up. And that’s true not only for highly chemical and radioactive sites on lab property, but for cities large and small, with problems ranging from dry-cleaning chemicals to gas tank leaks to unregulated mining practices.

New Mexico currently has 20 Superfund cleanup sites, areas the Environmental Protection Agency lists as the most significant priorities for environmental cleanup because of the scope of contamination and threat to public health. State and EPA records that track the progress of these sites show that merely identifying the problem is only the tipping point — the cleanup of industrial pollution often can span the length of time it would take a child to grow up and have a family of his or her own.

Kara Cook-Schultz, director of the Toxic Program for the Public Interest Research Group, said a lack of state and federal funding, coupled with pushback from polluters uninterested in paying for remediation, contributes to long-delayed cleanups nationwide.

“It shouldn’t be that hard to say, ‘This objectively is really bad, you yourself [as the company] think it’s really bad, why are we wasting time?’ ” she said.

“Sadly,” Cook-Schultz said, decades spent without fixing issues, like the chromium plume, “is not uncommon.”

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In addition to the chromium plume, the U.S. Department of Energy plans to spend at least $25 million to clean up a plume of the explosive compound RDX at the lab. That plume resulted from explosives testing that began in the 1950s, and is still conducted today. Over time, it has contaminated regional groundwater at several wells, with explosive remnants detected at 100 feet and deeper.

But in 2015 the lab said in a presentation to the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, a 20-year-old group that provides community input to the Energy Department, that “uncertainty remains about the lateral and vertical extent of these groundwater zones” and that it would take at least another decade to remedy.

At Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, leaks from underground fuel lines and tanks allowed jet fuel to seep into the soil and groundwater over a four-decade period. In 1999, the New Mexico Environment Department was notified of the spill. Initial work to clean up the contaminated soil began in 2003, and nearly 5,000 tons of soil were removed over the following decade. But groundwater cleanup has stalled.

The plume is thought to be nearly 7,000 feet long and up to 1,100 feet wide and at a depth of more than 400 feet — a footprint that reaches beyond Kirtland’s gates. If left untreated, groundwater models show, it eventually would migrate into the water below some residential areas in Albuquerque. Project timelines show cleanup work on the spill extending into the 2020s.

But it’s dry-cleaning chemicals that have confounded some communities across the state, prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to declare a number of areas Superfund sites, many of them dating to the 1990s.

According to the EPA, a laundromat and dry cleaner in Española was responsible for contaminating the aquifer that 10,000 residents in the city and 2,000 members of nearby Santa Clara Pueblo rely on for drinking water.

The 800-foot-wide plume of tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene and dichloroethylene extended underground about three-quarters of a mile from the site of the former business on Railroad Avenue to the Rio Grande, the state Environment Department announced in a news release in 2004, after it had secured EPA funding for remediation. The contamination had forced the closure of two municipal wells.

The tainted groundwater wasn’t the only risk, the EPA said. The dry-cleaning chemicals also can vaporize and seep up into homes.

The plume was identified in 1992, but it took almost a decade to add the site to the EPA’s national priorities list. The EPA and the state have been working to remedy the contamination since 2001 by injecting a bioagent into the groundwater. As of 2015, however, the site still contained enough contamination to remain on the Superfund priority list, and there was uncertainty about whether the state and federal agencies’ efforts to remedy the problem had been effective.

The EPA said in 2015 that “there is currently no known human exposure to contaminated groundwater.” Still, the agency said, a permanent remedy is needed.

Five other sites in the state have been added to the EPA’s Superfund list as a result of dry-cleaning chemical contamination; dozens of other sites also are contaminated with the toxins.

As of February 2017, there were more than 60 ongoing environmental cleanup projects listed by the state Environment Department’s Ground Water Quality Bureau for water contamination from various chemicals, including diesel, nitrates and volatile organic compounds. The state’s spreadsheet of environmental cleanup projects that already have been completed — dating back to the 1950s — runs 27 pages long.

Meanwhile, the chromium plume at Los Alamos, while not a new discovery, has taken on increased visibility after it was found to be closer to the county water supply than previously believed. Studies show the contamination is just a quarter-mile from a key drinking water well.

County officials say they will stop pumping water and file an insurance claim if the plume contaminates the well in question. But the county has taken out a 10-year insurance policy to prepare for potential drinking water issues. The policy could cover the cost of drilling a new well or installing a filtration system, said Julie Williams-Hill, a spokeswoman for Los Alamos County’s Department of Public Utilities.

The lab and county have worked together since the issue was discovered, she added.

“I would like to point out that the Department of Energy and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have been working with Los Alamos County’s Department of Public Utilities since the chromium plume was first discovered in 2005,” Williams-Hill said. “Together, we continually monitor and test all the drinking water production wells.”

Well tests are conducted on a quarterly basis.

Steven Horak, a spokesman for the Energy Department’s Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, said, the process “inherently takes time.”

“The depth of the aquifer poses unique challenges, but there is no impediment to implementing a final remedy,” he said.

In a federal draft report from fall 2016, the cleanup of the plume was scheduled to be completed in 2028, and the total cost was expected to be at least $130 million.

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The Energy Department said last week that it would release an updated plan on chromium management in March.

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Contact Rebecca Moss at 505-986-3011 or rmoss@sfnewmexican.com.