New cleanup reports posted, expanding public view of LANL legacy work

New cleanup reports for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s legacy waste program are now public, adding another layer of scrutiny to groundwater and wetlands work that still shapes daily life in Los Alamos County. The latest documents include the 2025 Sandia Wetland Performance Report and the Land Application of Groundwater Decision Tree Annual Report for 2025, both posted in the Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract Electronic Public Reading Room.

That reading room matters because it is the public record for a cleanup effort that the Department of Energy says is meant to safely and transparently finish work tied to past nuclear weapons development and government-sponsored nuclear research at LANL. DOE says the program’s scope includes soil and groundwater remediation, decontamination and decommissioning, and transfer of remediated sites. In this context, legacy waste refers to material generated between 1970 and 1998.

The new reports do not stand alone. They sit inside a cleanup program that N3B Los Alamos says has treated more than 420 million gallons of hexavalent-chromium-contaminated groundwater since April 2018, collected more than 17,000 water samples, installed 136 structures to help stop contaminated storm-water runoff from moving, and carried out more than 9,300 storm-water control inspections. N3B also says it has investigated and remediated more than 280 contaminated legacy waste sites, completed work on two campaigns in the 2016 Consent Order with the New Mexico Environment Department, and finished work in three aggregate areas.

For residents living with the legacy of LANL in Sandia Canyon, Mortandad Canyon and nearby watersheds, the value of these annual filings is straightforward: they show whether cleanup systems are still functioning, where decisions are being made, and how regulators and contractors measure progress year by year. The public posting also signals that oversight is still active, not historical.

N3B says DOE has awarded a three-year contract extension for the cleanup work, and the next phase includes developing 11 new wells to characterize and treat contaminated groundwater. In its FY25 reporting, the company said all 11 of 11 2016 Consent Order milestones were completed in FY25, 115 of 116 milestones have been met contract-to-date, and more than 20,688 cubic meters of waste have been shipped off-site. For Los Alamos County, the new reading-room filings are a reminder that the county’s environmental risk, cleanup deadlines and transparency obligations are still moving together, report by report.