New Mexico Environment Department approves LANL plan to vent radioactive gas

By DANIELLE PROKOP
​Courtesy of Source NM

Los Alamos National Lab Team Leader for Radioactive Air Emissions Management Dave Fuehne in front of an air monitoring system during a media wildfire preparedness tour on May 28, 2025. Lab officials will be allowed to release a radioactive gas into the air as soon as this fall, following approval from state environment officials on Sept. 8, 2025. (Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory)

New Mexico environment officials on Monday gave permission for Los Alamos National Laboratory to vent a radioactive gas within the next six months.

​The decision came on the heels of federal officials urging the state in a recent letter to make a decision, and pushback from anti-nuclear and Indigenous groups about the proposal.

Specifically, LANL aims to vent four waste containers filled with tritium and hazardous waste that it packed in 2007 and left at the lab’s disposal site, called Area G. In 2016, LANL officials discovered the drums were building pressure and could potentially explode. In a worst-case scenario modeled for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency —  which the lab said was unlikely — a rupture of all four containers could expose people to a dosage of 20 millirem, double the airborne radiation limit that LANL is allowed to release for all operations for a whole year.

Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, can be naturally occurring or a byproduct from nuclear research. The EPA characterizes the gas as a lower threat, emitting radiation that often cannot penetrate the skin, and is only considered hazardous in large quantities from inhalation, skin absorption or consumed in tritiated water – a replacement of one of the hydrogen molecules with tritium.

Rick Shean, Resource Protection Division director for the New Mexico Environment Department, told Source NM that state officials and U.S. Environmental and Protection Agency officials will be onsite during the planned venting across 12 to 16 days during weekends.

“We will be there, us and the EPA, [so] if something does go wrong, there’s a discussion with [U.S. Department of Energy] that we can observe,” Shean said. “We’ll step in and stop it if we have to.”

Among several provisions in a Sept. 8 letter from the environment department to the National Nuclear Security Administration and the lab’s contractor, environment officials will require LANL to keep the release below 6 millirems as a “hard stop limit,” which is lower than the 8 millirems LANL proposed. Shean noted that a typical release of tritium throughout the year from the lab is between zero to 1.5 milirems.

Indigenous groups including Tewa Women United, Honor our Pueblo Existence and anti-nuclear groups have raised concerns that federal limits for tritium exposure levels of a of 10 millirem were based on men, not pregnant women or young children.

Shean said the department’s mandate takes the concern raised by the groups into consideration.

“We do understand the concern around thresholds being put out there, the standards being based on typically male adults,” he said. “That was one of the reasons guiding our decision to lower the threshold to this event to six milirems.”

In addition to the concerns about exposure levels, anti-nuclear activists and Indigenous groups also recently raised objections about what they described as restrictions on public participation and transparency at a recent meeting on the proposal. The state environment department previously set four conditions for NNSA and Triad to meet for approval, including a public meeting and tribal consultations.

The Sept. 8 letter concludes with an admonishment from state officials, saying the operation is necessary because of LANL’s “failure to properly manage hazardous waste at the time of generation followed by almost a 20-year disregard of compliance obligations under state laws and rules,” the letter said.

In a statement Monday, National Nuclear Security Administration Public Affairs Specialist Toni Chiri said laboratory officials will be in contact with Congressional, state, local and tribal governments to release the dates for the tritium venting expected this fall and will ensure the venting does not overlap with Pueblo Feast days or other events.

“This operation will be conducted with the utmost considerations for safety to LANL employees, the surrounding communities, and the environment,” Chiri said. “LANL engineers have done careful analysis of the controlled depressurization process and will monitor it in real-time to ensure safety.”

Emails requesting comment from the nearby Pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara went unreturned as of publication.

Joni Ahrends, executive director at Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, called the release a “pattern of practice,” saying that LANL has been contaminating air, land and water in the more than 80 years since the Manhattan Project.

“Who’s going to pay the price? The people of Northern New Mexico,” she said. “And there’s never an answer to the question: ‘when is it going to stop?’”