HAZARDOUS WASTE; Los Alamos has trouble containing all its waste

HAZARDOUS WASTE; Los Alamos has trouble containing all its waste
239 words
2 November 2009
Greenwire
GRWR
English
© 2009 E&E Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved
Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the homes of the nation's nuclear weapons industry, has had trouble containing all of its waste, some of which has percolated through the region's fractured geology toward some drinking water sources.
This waste is not a health threat, officials say, though monitoring of water runoff in canyons that feed into the Rio Grande has found, at times, elevated concentrations of a rocket fuel ingredient and various radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission.
"We are seeing no human or ecological risk," said Danny Katzman, director of the lab's water stewardship program. "We won't be surprised on occasion to see a higher-than-normal reading. But those higher values last for 40 minutes during a flood, and maybe two hours out of a year."

Earlier this decade, New Mexico's Environment Department ordered an extensive cleanup at Los Alamos. The lab's officials resisted the order for several years, saying the department exaggerated its claims, but finally agreed to a revised proposal to scrub 2,000 sites by 2015.
As part of the program, 300 monitoring wells and gauges have been installed. Contaminated soil is being removed from canyons and wetlands planted. This summer, the lab began shipping some of its most radioactive waste to a federal facility in Carlsbad (Frank Clifford, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1). -- PV