The LANL Damage Assessment Plan
The LANL Final Damage Assessment Plan was finalized April 30, 2014 and presents the assessment activities the LANL Natural Resource Trustee Council intends to conduct in order to assess injuries and service losses to natural resources in and around LANL, and to plan restoration of injured resources.
Assessment activities in the LANL Damage Assessment Plan (described in Chapter 6 of the Plan) include:
- Analysis of existing contaminant concentration data,
- Assessment of potential Pueblo losses,
- Terrestrial, aquatic, geological, and groundwater analyses, and
- Efforts to identify and scale restoration actions.
Implementation of the LANL Damage Assessment Plan
The Trustee Council is currently implementing the LANL Damage Assessment Plan and began by prioritizing an initial set of assessment activities, many of which are ongoing:
- An evaluation of the various options for treating non-detect samples in the LANL NRDA. The final report from this activity, Treatment of Non-Detects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Natural Resource Damage Assessment is available for reference (dated June 2017).
- An evaluation of the available ecotoxicity information for a suite of contaminants of ecological concern at LANL.
- An evaluation of existing ecological contaminant concentration data, LANL terrestrial, aquatic, and geologic information, and related environmental data.
- An evaluation of groundwater contaminant concentration and related data and an evaluation of groundwater baseline conditions and services. Two final reports from this activity, Baseline Condition of Groundwater Resources in and around Los Alamos National Laboratory (dated June 2020), and Groundwater Contaminant Data Characterization (dated December 2021), are available for reference.
- An evaluation of the impact of wildland fires on pathway, injury, and restoration.
- An assessment of surface water flows and habitats in canyon areas.