Nuclear Poison at Los Alamos National Labs

Ten years from now, Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) could be making as many as 80 to 100 plutonium warhead “pits” a year to upgrade America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The construction of a massive $13 billion “pit” manufacturing complex at LANL has already started, but, unbelievable as it sounds, without benefit of a formal environmental impact statement (EIS), according to a report from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

To make a proper EIS, analysts would have to revisit LANL’s dismal history of hazardous waste management, a history that makes LANL and America’s nuclear regulatory agencies seem callous, lackadaisical and at times absurdly incompetent, treating radioactive waste more as a tedious pest than a public health menace. Not to study the potential impact of a colossal plutonium manufacturing project is, on the face of it, preposterous, and leaves New Mexico vulnerable to the accident-prone arrogance of the nuclear bomb industry.

Plutonium is “the most toxic substance known,” according to FAS. A plutonium “pit” is the explosive source in a thermonuclear weapon. It’s so radioactively charged and dangerous that tools and materials that have merely been exposed to it have to be stored half a mile underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

When plutonium pit production and nuclear experiments were carried out at LANL during the Cold War, many millions of gallons of plutonium-laced wastewater were washed down Jemez Mountain canyons that empty into the Rio Grande, with heavy plutonium residue settling to the bottom of Cochiti Lake. Eventually some plutonium ended up in northern wells that partially supply Santa Fe with drinking water.

In 2002, nuclear waste mismanagement at LANL was so calamitous and threatening that the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) issued an administrative order demanding a full clean-up of the lab’s hazardous waste. NMED characterized LANL’s radioactive waste disposal practices at over 2100 hazardous waste sites as being “of imminent and substantial endangerment” to the people of northern New Mexico.

LANL has always underplayed the danger of plutonium and its waste products. A 2009 document from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), known as the Los Alamos Historic Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) report, shows the true magnitude of plutonium hazard at LANL. It describes massive “airborne plutonium releases” from LANL from 1948 to 1978 that could “easily exceed the independently reconstructed airborne plutonium release totals from the production plants of Hanford (Washington), Rocky Flats (Colorado), and Savannah River (South Carolina) combined, even without the other sources and other years at LANL included.”

The report went on to say that “because facilities of the nuclear weapons complex used a wide variety of toxic materials and operated for decades behind a ‘cloak of secrecy,’ public concern about potential health risks from their operations grew as more was learned about past activities and events. And in New Mexico, suspicions would have undermined public confidence even more if it had been known that between 1979 and 1992, each of the Atomic Energy Commission sites around the country had undergone ‘retrospective evaluations of historical releases and potential health effects … except Las Alamos (emphasis mine).”

Not to perform a full and public EIS on the new plutonium pit manufacturing site at LANL is not only an insult to the intelligence of New Mexicans, but a continuation of decades of secrecy that has hidden from the public what amounts to a unimaginable indifference to health and safety downwind and downstream of LANL’s plutonium works.

How will all that new hazardous waste be managed? Will plutonium-heavy wastewater be dumped down canyons again? How much waste will be produced, of what kinds and what dangers? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of us in New Mexico are potential “downwinders” from LANL. Something goes wrong up there, and it’s likely to have consequences for all of us. But if those consequences are unforeseen because no public planning, or public thinking, has been done, or allowed to have been done — the kind that arises from doing an EIS — then we’ll all be caught flatfooted when something does go wrong, as it surely will.

From the perspective of the military industrial complex, worrying about such eventualities turns you into a “crank.” Or if you are like the Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, who advocates eloquently for nuclear disarmament, you become the object of ridicule in local editorials that make it seem that you’re a naïve idealist.

Still, worry we must. There’s not a single shred of evidence, that I can tell, that points to LANL and the National Nuclear Security Administration suddenly acquiring an environmental conscience, not to mention a will to preserve public health. This is especially true in the Trumpian era of wholesale environmental deregulation. Will we see the NMED policing the project and analyzing its hazardous waste disposal systems? Will the governor and attorney general put together a joint task force to keep an eye on the whole operation? Or will we get blindsided like we did six years ago at WIPP, when a canister of low-level plutonium waste exploded underground and sent radioactive exhaust into the atmosphere around its site and down to Carlsbad some 35 miles away?

It is not naïve to be concerned.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it