If the world right now seems to you more irrational and out of control than ever before, you’re not alone. Here in the national security precincts of northern New Mexico, the ultimate lunacy — spending tens of billions of dollars on the design, manufacture, and now the updating of nuclear weapons so threatening to life on earth that they can never and must never be used — continues unabated.
For nearly 85 years, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where doomsday weapons were born and perfected, has been so cavalier about its toxic waste that many of us seriously worry for the health of our families and communities. And there’s good reason. In 2007, for instance, ratepayers in Santa Fe found in their water bill a warning that plutonium, potentially among the most deadly radiotoxins, had been found contaminating one of the city’s major wells downstream of LANL.
Such destabilizing realities are brought to us by the strategy of deterrence known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). During the Cold War, MAD was the reasoning behind the construction of 70,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Today there are “only” 12,300 or so, about 3,900 of which are deployed on missiles and in bombers, and about 2,100 of those ready to fire. The United States has some 5,200 warheads, Russia 5,500, and China 600. France, England, India, Pakistan, Isreal and North Korea have the rest.
As if that doesn’t seem more than enough, just last week, the Los Alamos Study Group, a longtime monitor of the nuclear weapons industry here, reported that LANL could dramatically increase its manufacture of replacement plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear weapon, to as many as 100 a year. I can’t begin to imagine how much hazardous waste such a step up in production could create.
One might assume that the nuclear industrial complex would place a premium on responsibly and safely disposing of its hazardous waste. But that assumption would be wrong. Just last month, the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) moved to fine LANL and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), some $16 million for their “long standing lack of urgency” in cleaning up their legacy waste and groundwater contamination, Nuclear Watch New Mexico reports. Legacy waste still pollutes such places as the south fork of Acid Canyon, right below the original townsite of Los Alamos, in which millions of gallons of plutonium-polluted wastewater was dumped over the years, creating hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of contaminated sediment. Acid Canyon drains into the lands of San Ildefonso Pueblo and empties eventually into the Rio Grande, extending as far as Cochiti Lake 17 miles away.
Sixteen million dollars in penalties sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the bucket when one considers the harm the nuclear industrial complex has already done to the public’s health in New Mexico since the early 1940s. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence of leukemia and thyroid cancer spreading through whole communities downwind of LANL and even stories of entire families being killed off by such diseases. Anecdotal evidence tends to be ignored for not being “statistically significant” and falling into the logical trap of mistaking a correlation of incidents with the direct causation of illnesses. To many New Mexicans, though, such statistical “logic” is merely a way to weasel out of taking responsibility for decades of carelessly unprofessional and haphazard pollution control on the part of the DOE and LANL. Enormous amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste remain there. Nearly 4,000 drums of legacy waste are still stacked on the ground at one site after all these years. A plume of hexavalent chromium still pollutes the groundwater. Some 2,000 more drums of waste are stacked under tents at one of many other above-ground waste disposal sites. All that says nothing about the immense volume of buried toxic waste still to be cleaned up.
The thought of making 100 new plutonium pits a year in the metallurgy facilities at LANL, and adding untold new amounts of radioactive and chemical waste into New Mexico’s environment, is more terrifying than ever thanks to the Trump administration’s curtain of blather that’s rendered the DOE almost completely opaque.
It’s hard not to worry that with such a massive increase in production LANL might become another Rocky Flats, worthy of being shut down altogether. The former plutonium pit manufacturing facility outside of Denver was boarded up in 1989, after leaking drums and fires spread radioactive pollution into the Colorado environment. The National Library of Medicine reports that “people who lived near the facility were exposed to plutonium mainly through inhalation during routine operations.” It doesn’t seem unlikely that’s happening to people living around or downwind from LANL.
One way for New Mexicans to overcome their feelings of disempowerment is to call for a moratorium on new plutonium pit production at LANL so that it doesn’t create more life-threatening radiotoxic waste to be dumped, poured and buried around us before all its legacy waste has been cleaned up. It’s time to stop focusing on sensationalized national news and concentrate on problems we just might have an outside chance to do something about.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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