For many realists, the development of nuclear weapons at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos is unquestionably the greatest mistake of human history. It has threatened the annihilation of our species since the very beginning, 78 years ago in New Mexico at 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945. That morning at Trinity Site, the first atomic bomb, known as the “gadget,” was detonated in the Jornada del Muerto, spreading its mushroom cloud 38,000 feet into the sky over what is now White Sands Missile Range, 35 miles southeast of Socorro. The light from the explosion could be seen more than 280 miles away.
There’s likely to be lots of press coverage and hoopla around that anniversary. The story will hit the front pages, as it always has. But none of the coverage, I’m sure, will mention what a growing number of New Mexican’s have always feared — that the Land of Enchantment would become not only a first strike target in a nuclear war, but also a “peacetime” nuclear sacrifice zone.
Those fears are building again, with a boom in nuclear facility construction and dangerous R and D work at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in Albuquerque, at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) site near Carlsbad and at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), where key radioactive components of nuclear warheads are to be manufactured again. The mainstream media isn’t reporting on this boom, but thanks to information supplied by local watchdog groups and dedicated researchers and analysts, there’s no doubt about it. The nuclear industrial complex is having its way with New Mexico whether we like it or not.
Our fears of a nuclear takeover started to gain real momentum in the 1970s when our state became the site of the WIPP underground nuclear waste storage facility that would house a huge amount of so-called “low level” plutonium contaminated manufacturing materials. Our anxieties grew even more in the late 1980s when it was estimated that a staggering number of nuclear warheads — 70,000 — already existed around the world. Even after aggressive nuclear arms reduction treaties, as of early this year 12,500 nuclear warheads, some of them battle ready, were stockpiled in nine countries around the world.
The growing fear of nuclear calamity, along with damage to human health from radioactive waste, was brought close to home for New Mexicans when a Colorado plutonium pit manufacturing plant known as Rocky Flats was shut down in 1989 after an FBI raid on the facility that found huge amounts of lethal plutonium waste haphazardly stored and accumulated in multiple violations of federal anti-pollution laws.
New Mexicans made the logical leap that if highly toxic plutonium waste was being mishandled at a Department of Energy (DOE) facility in Colorado, it was a fair bet it was happening at DOE facilities at New Mexico too. Eight years after Rocky Flats was closed and leveled, in May 2000, the 43,000 acre “controlled burn” Cerro Grande fire raged in and around LANL confirming our worst fears and intuitions.
But no one knew or could have imagined what the fire revealed — that some 2,123 hazardous waste sites were scattered over the LANL precinct. In 2002, the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) issued an administrative order demanding clean up of LANL wastes, characterizing the lab’s practices as being in “imminent and substantial endangerment” to the people of Northern New Mexico. Two years later, SNL received the same order from the NMED. Twenty one years later, however, about half of the waste in Las Alamos still hasn’t been cleaned up and much of the hazardous contents of remediated sites remain on the Pajarito Plateau. SNL’s clean up of its massive amounts of hazardous waste is still clouded in national security obscurity.
Then in February 2014, New Mexican’s learned that a canister containing plutonium waste from LANL had exploded at WIPP and contaminated 13 “above-ground” workers there. Traces of plutonium were even found in the air around Carlsbad. What if something like that happened at SNL in Albuquerque, or anywhere in our state?
The current nuclear boom seems to up the odds in favor of catastrophe. As Nuclear Watch New Mexico reminds us, even as LANL “takes on contracts for new weapons manufacturing,” involving plutonium metallurgy, “taxpayers are still shelling out for the clean-up costs of contamination dating back to atomic bomb testing” in the 1940s and 1950s. And to top it off, LANL apparently isn’t very good at cleaning up its mess either, accumulating nearly a quarter of a million dollars in fines for safety violations last year. Most worrisome, though, is that cleaning-up nuclear waste doesn’t mean removing it from Los Alamos. Nuke Watch figures that even after the clean up of some 1,600 of the 2,123 contaminated sites, some 690,000 cubic meters of waste is “permanently buried on-sight (sic) in unlined pits and shafts above a regional aquifer that provides drinking water to San Ildefonso Pueblo, Española, Los Alamos and Santa Fe, among other communities.”
Recently the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration approved administrative measures that assures LANL will continue its infrastructure building boom that will lead to an annual production of 30 plutonium warhead pits a year, the explosion of ten of which might well cause an annihilating nuclear winter.
According to the PR machine at WIPP, the building boom is coming up roses there too, with the creation of a “Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System,” a new “filter building,” with 1,000-horsepower fans, and updates at the “salt reduction building,” including de-misters, de-dusters, and booster fans. And a new large storage area down a half mile underground is being prepared to accept more waste canisters, some say in violation of agreements between the New Mexcio and the DOE that WIPP would never be expanded.
In early June this year, the Sandia National Laboratories Site — Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) was revised in ways that are not reassuring. According to the principal citizen expert on SNL, Dave McCoy, a tireless and courageous nuclear analyst who heads up Citizen Action New Mexico, the SWEIS has little or nothing to say about the “extremely large amounts of hazardous and radioactive wastes” that SNL “generates and stores.”
McCoy’s nine page critique of SWEIS points out that it doesn’t present a plan “for reducing the more than 120,000 pounds of hazardous waste produced annually just at the Albuquerque site” alone. It doesn’t consider the “potential impacts of climate change especially with respect to the fate and transport of buried wastes.” It needs to address the rate of cancer deaths at SNL, considering the $42,000,000 spent each year on worker compensation and medical costs. McCoy wants SNL to show “how it will dispose of waste streams generated by decommissioning and decontamination of toxic and radioactively contaminated buildings.” And McCoy says that SNL “has not provided the public with a comprehensive review of ground water contamination and the effects on Albuquerque’s aquifer.” For a more thorough rundown on Dave McCoy’s observations and objections, he can be reached at dave@radfreenm.org.
The nuke boom continues to power along, and we haven’t mentioned Holtec International of Jupiter, N.J., yet. It was granted a permit last year from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a “temporary” storage site for most if not all the nation’s highly dangerous commercial spent fuel rods despite the passionate opposition of New Mexico’s governor, the state legislature and the New Mexico congressional delegation.
While the opposition to Holtec has been gratifying, even if the state should prevail in his dispute, we’ll probably always be awash in legacy and contemporary military nuclear waste that causes deeply worrisome public health concerns that have never been adequately addressed. The New Mexico political establishment can get up in arms over commercial nuclear waste coming to New Mexico but when it comes to national security waste, they seem to have no stomach to stop it, or even heavily regulate it. They act as if they have no choice but to keep championing congressional funding for an escalating nuclear arms race and to the continuing updating of nuclear warheads and the institutions that manufacture and support them. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), and the ongoing production of nuclear warheads, simply take precedents over public health in NM, no matter the sincerity, hard work, and courage of those local lawmakers and activists who oppose it.
We hear stories of whole families in the Española Valley, down wind of LANL, dying of cancer. We read of elevated cancers all over northern New Mexico, and despite the outcries of members of the New Mexico House and Senate, we still we get patted on the head by federal spokesmen and told not to worry our pretty little heads while they dispense sobersided assurances that there are no health risks at all associated with making nuclear weapons.
It seems preposterous, but the pressures on lawmakers to ignore the hazards of nuclear waste come down largely to larding up favorable job statistics, to not rocking the boat when it comes to the wonders and status of amoral science and technology and the vast fortunes they produce, and to the ungodly Strangelovian prestige of it all.
Every year we celebrate the anniversary of the Trinity explosion, we have a reminder to double down, once again, on getting serious about ridding ourselves of radioactive military waste and putting the health of New Mexicans at the top of our priorities once and for all. There is no logical connection, absolutely none, between staying competitive on the world stage and being unconscionably messy, cavalier, irresponsible, and callous about public health in New Mexico when it comes to nuclear waste. None.
It’s hard to admit. Our fears have come true. New Mexico continues to bear a painful burden of “collateral damage” from R and D work during the duck-and-cover Cold War era to the present hair trigger world of updated hydrogen bombs and “tactical” battlefield nuclear weapons. But hope is based on change, and as we know everything changes, sometimes even for the better. That may seem lame, but really so far, despite all our efforts, that’s all we’ve got.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you, V. B., for always paying attention. The risk and sudden doom outlined in this column paint a devastating picture. It is one I have long suspected. Seeing it spelled out so clearly here is enlightening and also overwhelming. We need laws–clear enforceable laws–that would prevent situations such as this one. Other countries have them, why don’t we? I believe one reason is that our political structure and politicians care more about their own power than about our general well being. Until we do have such laws, we will not be safe from the various horrors that stalk us.
What boggles the mind is that they’re continuing to make more! We already have enough to destroy the Earth several times over. Making more is simply insane.