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Great article - I’m fascinated by pollution for some reason. I recently spent time living near Los Alamos, NM. The physicists and nuclear chemists surely outdi

Great article - I’m fascinated by pollution for some reason. I recently spent time living near Los Alamos, NM. The physicists and nuclear chemists surely outdid WW1 in their legacy of environmental devastation. Check out Acid Canyon, a popular recreation area in the middle of Los Alamos. If I recall, they opened this place to the public for recreation in 1962, then a few years later barrels containing plutonium waste surfaced after a heavy rain. Then they opened it again. http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/site/4-acid-pueblo-canyon/ http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/site/4-acid-pueblo-canyo... http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/doublestandard.html http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/doublestandard.html http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-will-never-be-clean/article_a3cc7ce1-8af0-5113-8f38-5d4aa673fd7a.html http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-... I guess at some point they stopped dumping untreated liquid plutonium waste there. That was a good move. The wastewater facility for the entire Natl Lab for decades that processed all of the toxic chemical, metal and nuclear waste discharged the water untreated until the 60s. There are dozens of uninventoried dump sites and things like full closets in basements with uranium that nobody has looked at in a couple decades. Oh, and people who work there suggested to me that all the public info made available is falsified for one reason or another. DP Rd and TA-21, site of first plutonium machining facility, and the wastewater ‘treatment’ (meaning untreated discharge) facility, is another interesting one. They’re currently environmentally remediating the area for homes.

bitexploder 8y ago
We have Rocky Flats here in Denver. We have built giant neighborhoods in the shadow of that facility with a similar reckless history of nuclear and industrial waste related to nuclear weapons production.
- code_duck 8y ago
  Indeed, there are many such nuclear sites, particularly in the West. The main dump for Los Alamos, TA-54, which has been in service 35-45 years, is 900 feet above the aquifer that serves Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and 2 miles from the Rio Grande. One of the dozens of disposal areas it contains includes a dump, MDA-C (it is it Area G?) that consists of 4 200 foot shafts, putting their large inventory of toxic and highly nuclear waste only 700 feet above NM’s drinking water table. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_Attachment%20N.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_A... Figure 8 shows at lower right the four negative pressure tents covering the shafts, which were visible from my backyard in White Rock.
jacobush 8y ago
Falsified ... into what? It's not clear to me what stance they held.
- code_duck 8y ago
  It wasn’t clear to me exactly what that meant, either. Reports made to environmental agencies may be falsified for national security, avoidance of public alarm, and cleanup-avoidance reasons. Many of the activities here are secret and classified, after all. My interpretation is that this would mean they have been altered to cover up alarming facts about pollution as well as to not inform rivals about weapons research activities. The federal government has been battling the state about environmental cleanup for 40 years. For example, they wanted a permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Los Alamos - state of NM doesn’t agree.
pmorici 8y ago
The West Lake Landfill is another where a bunch of nuclear material was illegally dumped. A creek runs past it and the dump has had a subterranean fire burning for years in very close proximity to the estimated location of the nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill
usefulcat 8y ago
While in college, one spring break 3 friends and I decided to cram into my small car and drive from Texas to the Grand Canyon. On the way we went through Los Alamos. At one point we were on or near the laboratory grounds and came across a sign that read something along the lines of "Dirt removal from canyon prohibited". I remember thinking it was so unusual that I took a picture of it (this was before digital photography, so you generally had to be more selective about what you chose to photograph).
- code_duck 8y ago
  Right by my house was an area used for bomb testing in the 50s and 60s - there are many pictures of the different types of live ordinance one could potentially encounter. Down the street there’s an area very contaminated with chromium from a power plant, that the Feds claim magically stops right at the Pueblo line. That and whatever you saw barely scratches the surface, no doubt. There are thousands of dump sites in Los Alamos. They didn’t even keep records of all of them or what was in any of them until recently.

bitexploder 8y ago

We have Rocky Flats here in Denver. We have built giant neighborhoods in the shadow of that facility with a similar reckless history of nuclear and industrial waste related to nuclear weapons production.

code_duck 8y ago
Indeed, there are many such nuclear sites, particularly in the West. The main dump for Los Alamos, TA-54, which has been in service 35-45 years, is 900 feet above the aquifer that serves Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and 2 miles from the Rio Grande. One of the dozens of disposal areas it contains includes a dump, MDA-C (it is it Area G?) that consists of 4 200 foot shafts, putting their large inventory of toxic and highly nuclear waste only 700 feet above NM’s drinking water table. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_Attachment%20N.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_A... Figure 8 shows at lower right the four negative pressure tents covering the shafts, which were visible from my backyard in White Rock.

jacobush 8y ago

Falsified ... into what? It's not clear to me what stance they held.

code_duck 8y ago
It wasn’t clear to me exactly what that meant, either. Reports made to environmental agencies may be falsified for national security, avoidance of public alarm, and cleanup-avoidance reasons. Many of the activities here are secret and classified, after all. My interpretation is that this would mean they have been altered to cover up alarming facts about pollution as well as to not inform rivals about weapons research activities. The federal government has been battling the state about environmental cleanup for 40 years. For example, they wanted a permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Los Alamos - state of NM doesn’t agree.

pmorici 8y ago

The West Lake Landfill is another where a bunch of nuclear material was illegally dumped. A creek runs past it and the dump has had a subterranean fire burning for years in very close proximity to the estimated location of the nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill

usefulcat 8y ago

While in college, one spring break 3 friends and I decided to cram into my small car and drive from Texas to the Grand Canyon. On the way we went through Los Alamos. At one point we were on or near the laboratory grounds and came across a sign that read something along the lines of "Dirt removal from canyon prohibited". I remember thinking it was so unusual that I took a picture of it (this was before digital photography, so you generally had to be more selective about what you chose to photograph).

code_duck 8y ago
Right by my house was an area used for bomb testing in the 50s and 60s - there are many pictures of the different types of live ordinance one could potentially encounter. Down the street there’s an area very contaminated with chromium from a power plant, that the Feds claim magically stops right at the Pueblo line. That and whatever you saw barely scratches the surface, no doubt. There are thousands of dump sites in Los Alamos. They didn’t even keep records of all of them or what was in any of them until recently.