Poisoning the Wells vs. Boiling Water With the Sun

As climate change tightens its grip on the Southwest and the rest of the nation, a feeling of hopelessness can seep into our thinking. And yet, if there was ever a time for clarity, for facing up to facts, for honing our adaptive skills, this is it.

As always, it’s a matter of putting first things first. When it comes to water, the Southwest’s greatest vulnerability, one of the first things to do after you attempt to secure a reliable water supply — through conservation and recycling — is to clean up poisoned parts of aquifers, ones that endanger public health and have languished for decades because it’s easier to deny they’ve been compromised than it is to fix them.

New Mexico and the Southwest face myriad such problems, many, if not most, having to do with aquifer contamination from military bases, such as Kirtland Air Force Base and its 24-million-gallon jet fuel spill, and from the storied nuclear research and development (R and D) work done by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), both major employers and major forces for public policy in the state and nation. Waste management at both facilities was characterized nearly two decades ago by the New Mexico Environment Department (PDF) as being of “substantial and immanent endangerment” to public health. Both refused to admit culpability but in consent agreements with the state signed off on cleaning up their dangerous messes, but not all of them by any means. It’s a fair assumption that every one of the 100 or so Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapons R and D labs around the country — from Hanford, Washington to Oak Ridge Tennessee; Rocky Flats, Colorado (now turned into a public open space!) and Savannah River George — have nuclear and industrial hazardous waste horror stories of their own. None is an isolated entity; rather, all operate off values and policies applicable to all nuclear weapons installations that are set at a national level.

Wrestling with the labs seems like a fruitless battle, especially when it comes to national security pollution. But many unsolvable problems get solved if there’s a will to do so. If there isn’t, one can only assume disguised culpability and indifference to public health.

Whatever it takes to secure a reliable water supply — from being inventive and far-seeing about recycling water or finding the will to fix pollution problems long covered up — that’s the bottom line for learning how to adapt to and survive climate change in the Southwest.

Take El Paso’s world-class water program of desalinization, “toilet to tap” recycling, and conservation. Not only did El Paso, a desert city becoming ever more arid, put itself into a position of being “drought proof” for the foreseeable future, it helped its sister city, Ciudad Juarez, across the border, to pump less water and to find a new appropriate technology to distill water for human consumption. It did this basically on a handshake between the two cities, with no international agreement, avoiding its attendant and time-consuming complications.

The El Paso Solar Energy Association (EPSEA) set up a dozen solar water distillation operations in Ciudad Juarez and has been engaged with the U.S. EPA to begin community solar stills in Texas and New Mexico. Solar distillation uses the heat of the sun to boil water and collect its evaporation, which is clean of most, if not all, contaminants. The innovate technology is based on well-known natural processes that are activated by solar heat rather than natural gas or other polluting fuels. Solar distillation appears to have applications all across the Southwest.

When it comes to pollution in aquifers from the military industrial complex, and the nuclear weapons R and D industry across the Southwest, we are in a realm dominated by PR spin, top secret operations and the impenetrable cloak of military secrecy.

Take an updated version on an old, old story in New Mexico — plutonium and other radionuclides in collections of dust around northern New Mexico from decades of R and D at LANL. This contamination would end up in household dust on top of ceiling fans, on window sills, even in fire ash, auto air filters, and any place dust collects. If plutonium collects in dust, it must also fall into water and open fields, and on animals and humans. Plutonium, we know, is dangerous to health when it is ingested, or invades the body through wounds, or is inhaled. As an alpha particle emitting powerful radiation where it lands inside the body, it’s associated with various types of virulent cancers.

People who keep up with such things have known about plutonium dust research for years. Las month, the Los Angeles Times reported on peer-reviewed findings by scientists in Boston at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who found evidence of plutonium, uranium and other radioactive particles in New Mexican dust. The immediate response of the DOE, of course, was to pat the public on the head and say basically there wasn’t enough radioactivity to do any harm. But the point, though, with alpha emitters, is that once they’re inside you, the tiniest amount is potentially lethal. The DOE’s response arises from a fundamental logical mistake — that specialists in nuclear weapons research can make useful generalizations about public health. They are not neonatologists, gerontologists, neuroscientists, or any category of experts in the medical professions. And if the DOE operatives who make such pronouncements also happen to be physicians, they are also on the DOE’s payroll.

All you have to do is go online and look up the Los Alamos Historic Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) report of 2009, produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to learn that LANL and every other nuclear weapons operation tend to underplay the danger they pose to public health. The LAHDRA report says that plutonium “releases from LANL could easily exceed the independently reconstructed airborne plutonium release totals from the production plants at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Savannah River combined….” It concludes that LANL drastically underplayed the magnitude of its releases of plutonium and other radionuclides into the atmosphere.

The LADRA report also confirms that “liquid radioactive waste was discharged to Acid Pueblo Canyon without treatment or monitor from 1945 through 1950.” And that there wasn’t a year from 1945 to 1996, and perhaps beyond that, when plutonium, strontium 90, and other forms of radioactivity weren’t released into the water ways of the canyons coming off the Pajarito Plateau and leading into the Rio Grande.”

One of the laws of ecology is that “everything has to go somewhere,” and plutonium and other radioactive waste did, indeed, go somewhere — into our surface and groundwater. Plutonium was even acknowledged by Santa Fe City government to have made it into the Santa Fe water supply. (Orphaned Land)

SNL, in Albuquerque, has its own hazardous waste issues, of course. Despite Sandia’s exemplary work in alternative energy, water systems and climate change, the New Mexico Environment Department charged Sandia with endangering the population of Albuquerque with radioactive wastes the lab had dumped over the years on land that is perilously close to the aquifer and wells used by the City and Kirtland Air Force Base, including dumping hazardous waste into Tijeras Arroyo and local ditch systems. Some estimate the discharges were as much as 12 million gallons. Local environmental groups, particularly Citizen Action, have been protesting a “mixed waste landfill” with highly toxic chemicals and radioactive elements, demanding it be removed. SNL has basically responded that it was too dangerous to move.

What has happened to all the hazardous and radioactive waste SNL has dumped on our land and poured into our water ways? It has to have gone somewhere, just as the waste from LANL has. And likely as not, it has gone into our aquifer. And one day, as climate change shrinks our surface water supply, taxpayers will have to pay to remove military wastes from our aquifer and make what’s been contaminated suitable for human consumption once again. It will cost a fortune, but we will have to do it.

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