Even though New Mexico gets close to 35% of its total annual revenue from the federal government, making it one of the most federally dependent states in the country, when it comes to the potential harm and collateral hazard of military pollution, it seems the feds have been thumbing their noses at us for decades.
This high-handedness is particularly egregious when it comes to the endless procrastination and foot dragging around cleaning up legacy plutonium, polonium and other toxic waste at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) (though it’s improving of late thanks to President Biden’s budget), removing legacy waste at the Mixed Waste Landfill (MWL) at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in Albuquerque, the millions of gallons of jet fuel spilled into Albuquerque’s groundwater near Kirtland Air Force Base and the relentlessly creeping transformation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad from an experimental grave for “low-level” plutonium waste to a repository for very hot and dangerous “high-level” waste, a possibility the federal government has promised since the mid-1990s would never come to pass.
It took New Mexico suing LANL and the Department of Energy (DOE) over their chronic stalling to have the Biden Administration increase the DOE remediation budget at LANL. And now, once again, due to bureaucratic and political fudging, the gnarly issues at Sandia’s MWL have ignited interest about a toxic site that the military once said was too dangerous to move.
All the above sites have been plagued for years by broken promises, missed deadlines, reports riddled with sins of omission and the debris of military conjuring tricks that obfuscate by changing units of measurement and foisting off on the public barrages of jargon, blithering euphemisms and confetti bursts of acronyms so arcane even the writers of such documents aren’t completely sure what they mean.
To this day, for instance, I doubt if anyone in the general public — including elected officials — knows how much jet fuel actually dripped into the city’s aquifer at Kirtland Air Force Base before the leak’s discovery in 1999. Estimates run from 8 to 24 million gallons. And it seems unlikely to me that even readers interested in such matters are definitively clear about the health risks of ingesting gasoline and its additives — other than the baldly obvious and odious risk of drinking any kind of petroleum fuel. And it goes almost without saying that Albuquerqueans have no clue as to how much it will ultimately cost to remove the jet fuel from our groundwater, how long it will take and how close we are to losing a sizable portion of our drinking water of last resort, even though data from comparable catastrophes around the country are readily available. But that’s what you get when you’re dealing with the stealth apparatus and conjuring tricks of a national security state.
Take, for instance, the relatively small half-million gallon spill of jet fuel and other deadly contaminants at the decommissioned George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, discovered in 1981. It took more than 40 years and nearly $200 million to “clean up” the groundwater. But when they were finished, it was still undrinkable. And irate former military personnel and their families found themselves victims in an ensuing public health disaster.
Military pollution in America is close to epidemic levels. At more than 150 military bases, “the contamination is so severe,” according to the Victorville Daily Press, “they have been designated Superfund sites.” The paper reports that Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee, whose state has numerous sites, nailed the issue when he said, “The biggest concern right now is that the Air Force hasn’t had any sense of urgency.” That seems to be true all over the country, and especially here in New Mexico. And it’s not just the Air Force.
The MWL is 5 miles southeast of the Albuquerque International Sunport and has a long-checkered history that includes a persistent, highly rational but still futile effort by activists and local residents to have its contents removed.
The site was opened in 1959, while the Cold War was bitter and dangerous. The landfill stopped taking hazardous waste in 1983. SNL describes the waste as mostly “low-level,” one of those worn out euphemisms designed to dampen public anxiety. “Low-level” is the term also used to describe the hazardous plutonium and R and D waste at WIPP. The underground storage area is literally a half a mile deep, carved out of a salt formation. In contrast, the WML’s 24 years of accumulated hazardous waste is covered over with a yard deep or so of top soil and native grasses. It’s too close for comfort to the Mesa del Sol planned community and the long-suffering Mountain View Neighborhood between Broadway and 2nd Street.
For many years, an organization called Citizen Action New Mexico (CANM) has battled through the maze of paperwork and dizzying language that the defense and energy bureaucracies’ artful dodgers use to avoid having to give straight answers about the contents and conditions at the WML site. SNL’s initial response was that its hazardous waste was too dangerous to move, but not too dangerous to say in place — a response that infuriated many people already beleaguered by mountains of industrial pollution in their neighborhood as well as realtors trying to sell home sites at Mesa del Sol.
Now after all these years of frustration, a SNL 5-Year Review of the site submitted in December 2018, during the end of Republican Suzanna Martinez’s administration, to the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) “indicated SNL could reliably excavate the MWL and ship the wastes offsite,” according to CANM, starting at the end of June 2020. But frustration still rules the day. That’s what you get when you try to penetrate the national security force field. Next to nada.
In a recent public records request to the NMED, CANM Executive Director Dave McCoy wrote that NMED has not responded to the most recent SNL’s 5-year report on MWL, and another report is due at the first of the year in 2024. “What length of time does the NMED consider as reasonable to delay a response… Precious time for cleanup of the MLW is being lost due to NMED delay. The SNL 5-Year Review was issued a full year before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
I wonder what will happen with President Biden’s 2022 budget proposal to increase the DOE’s LANL cleanup budget by 32%, or a $333 million? That’s certainly better than the $100 million cut in hazardous waste cleanup funds proposed for the DOE’s 2021 budget by the Trump administration. Still, it seems to me to be more of a gesture than a signal that the government is finally getting serious about preventing a potential massive public health calamity.
Legacy waste at LANL is vast. The 2000 Cerro Grande fire in and around LANL revealed more that 2,120 nuclear waste sites in the area, almost ten times more than were previously estimated. Plutonium has already been detected in Santa Fe’s water supply and was reported to residents by the city’s water authority in 2010. The Biden budget estimates it could cost as much as $8.4 billion to cleanup LANL’s hazardous waste through fiscal year 2090, the Albuquerque Journal reports. 2090! More than a long lifetime away, “though the job could be completed much sooner,” the Journal opined.
As tempting as it might to up the ante on hope and trust, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it just yet.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
As always, you bring us valuable information, useful data about the world in which we live. I wonder how many of our intensifying allergies and other ills can be traced to these toxic sites? I applaud the Biden administration’s increased support for cleanup, but as long as certain industries remain exempt for political reasons (I’m thinking of coal at the recent G7 Summit), profit remains more important than public health. Sadly, I don’t think our political system as it now exists can solve these problems.
Ditto
You have nailed the dishonesty of the defense industry and dependence of New Mexico on it. It’s time to cut the plutonium addiction. It’s time to cut the military addiction. Not just in New Mexico but across the country and the world. I am sick and tired of the Ben Ray Lujans and the Martin Heinrichs supporting the expansion of the tech of the labs not even stating the weapons related research and building that is going on with the funding of the bills they support. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock is as close as it has ever been, 100 seconds to midnight. When are we going to respond to the clear and present danger? Biden is increasing spending on nuclear weapons and the attendant disasters of war, misplaced economic priorities and, as stated in the article, ongoing nuclear waste and pollution problems. Wake up New Mexico, wake up everyone to a threat as great as anthropogenic climate change.