News from New Mexico, the Atomic State

Between 1956 and 1972, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) periodically flushed water containing chromium down Sandia Canyon. In 2005 a toxic plume of hexavalent chromium was discovered in ground water under LANL property. Fifty years later, those responsible for its clean-up —the Lab and the New Mexico State Environmental Department — continue to argue over how to fix the problem. 

In the meantime, some of the surrounding surface water isn’t faring much better. Because Los Alamos sits atop several mesas, storm run-off from some of the lab’s contaminated sites is flowing downhill into two canyons. PCBs in the canyons have been measured at 11,000 and 14,000 times the level deemed safe for human health. Work has been ongoing since 2011 to stop the downhill flow, but as the mitigation contractor says, “There is still more to do.”

Unfortunately, Santa Fe draws its water from the Rio Grande downstream from where the LANL run-off flows into the river. There is a monitoring system that collects data on the water quality, but only after a significant storm.

As far as radioactive waste goes, legacy waste from early bomb-making at LANL in the 1940s was temporarily stored in canisters on-site, awaiting removal to a safer and permanent location. Eighty years later, it’s still there. The good news is that Congress has designated 5.5% of LANL’s $5 billion budget to legacy clean-up.

Finally, there is the problem of the potential release of powdered radioactive plutonium, that will travel by trucks around the outskirts of Santa Fe as part of the current plan to produce plutonium pits (triggers for a new upgraded nuclear arsenal) at LANL. Santa Fe is on the route the trucks take back and forth between Los Alamos and Amarillo. Unfortunately, plutonium is possibly 100,000 times more radioactive than uranium.

This brings home the fact that nuclear waste is forever and triggers concerns for the health of humans and all life on Earth. In the case of a plutonium spill (which can NEVER happen according to the National Nuclear Security Administration), how it would be cleaned up is a mystery. It’s frightening that no entity has stepped forward to clarify potential plans. It certainly won’t be Santa Fe County, which has admitted to not having had a hazard reduction plan for any kind of disaster, man-made or nature-caused, since 2008.