Flood May Spread Radioactivity in Los Alamos

By Sascha Segan

July 10  Fifty-seven years of nuclear waste may soon come back to haunt the people of Los Alamos, N.M. Runoff from the Los Alamos labs could reach the Rio Grande river or a nearby Indian reservation. (ABCNEWS.com/ Magellan Geographix) After wildfires denuded the countryside around Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratories, flash floods now threaten to wash radioactive dirt buried as early as 1943 into the Rio Grande river and nearby Indian lands, activists said.

This is one of the more serious nuclear emergencies to occur in the U.S., said Robert Alvarez of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a local watchdog group which held an unprecedented joint meeting with lab officials this weekend to discuss the issue.

Congressman Tom Udall, R-N.M., said an unexpected heavy rainfall could cause trouble. The New Mexico monsoon season started July 4. If there are large storms beyond the normal, we could have some serious contamination problems. Thats what theyre working on right now, he said. Dam It The controlled brushfire started on May 4 and went wild, eventually scorching 47,000 acres, including 8,000 on lab property. Lab officials say theyre taking action to slow flood runoff on the ash-covered ground, reseeding grass, putting up log barriers and building a 50-foot-high concrete dam in one canyon. They say the radioactive waste isnt dangerous, but that they dont want it flooding off the lab site. Its just not a good thing to do from a good-neighbor standpoint, said Lee McAtee, the labs deputy division director for environmental safety and health. The lab has started trucking contaminated dirt out of one canyon, but McAtee says tearing up all the waste sites would do more damage than it would fix. You ravage the environment by going into a canyon bottom with big dump trucks and bulldozers, he said. Though the lab currently must abide by environmental regulations, McAtee said, that wasnt the case from Los Alamos founding in 1943 through the early 1960s, before the regulations were enacted. Los Alamos was the home of the Manhattan Project, which built the bomb used at Hiroshima in World War II. Watchdogs said the lab is still laying down waste that some scientists consider radioactive, but that is under the legal limit for harmlessness.

Greg Mello, who was New Mexicos lead hazardous waste inspector in 1984 and now heads the Santa Fe-based Los Alamos Study Group, said the lab is taking the wrong approach, and is acting without strong oversight. The waste at Los Alamos needs permanent stone caps on mesas full of waste, he said, and grass and bushes would provide better runoff control than a dam. The waste should definitely be stabilized for the ages, which the lab has no plans to do, he said.

Keep Talking This weekends meeting was an unusual show of good faith between lab officials and activists who have traditionally mistrusted each other, both sides said. The lab has operated under conditions of secrecy, isolation and privilege for 57 years, and the lab for the first time not only came out but publicly admitted that its conduct with the public has not been one that engenders trust, Alvarez said.

Los Alamos McAtee said the lab is finally trying to work with, not against, local citizens groups. We can do a lot more working together hopefully this is a small step in the right direction, he said

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/losalamos000710.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 10, 2000