July 16 – New Mexico anniversaries – of first nuclear weapons test, and of Church Rock radioactive waste disaster

Alicia Inez Guzmán, Investigative Reporter https://mailchi.mp/searchlightnm.org/high-beam-98-6254036?e=a70296a261 10 Jul 24

As far as anniversaries go, July 16 marks not one but two grave events. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer led a secret cadre of scientists to detonate the world’s first atomic bomb in the Chihuahuan Desert of south-central New Mexico. The light was so bright that a local blind woman could detect, briefly, the burst of illumination, local newspapers read. That same light was potent enough to bleach brown cows. The unearthly heat, meanwhile, turned sand into glass. But despite what was known about radiation at the time, nobody from the public was evacuated.

Exactly 34 years later, and at almost exactly the same time, an earthen dam holding uranium mill waste collapsed, unleashing 1,100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 94,000 gallons of tailings into northwestern New Mexico’s Rio Puerco. The Church Rock spill would release three times more radiation into the environment than the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, most of it into the lands of the Navajo Nation. It was, as the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it, the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history. To my own shock and horror — and I’m certain the shock and horror of countless others — New Mexico’s governor at the time refused to declare the breach a federal emergency. Again, nobody was evacuated.

The two events are indelibly linked, not only by the day and time they share, but also by a kind of hubris unique to the nuclear age. By that, I mean a kind of hubris in which the lives and lands of New Mexicans were, and in many ways continue to be, deliberately disregarded. Thousands of people lived within a 50-mile radius of the Trinity Site. The waste at Church Rock? It flowed past some 1,700 homes.

For me, the date also marks just over one year since I began writing about nuclear affairs in New Mexico, the only “cradle-to-grave-state” in the nation. In that time, I’ve covered safety lapses in the plutonium pit factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the school-to-lab pipeline, allegations of fraud, waste and abuse at LANL, a secret autopsy program, legacy plutonium contamination and many other thorny issues.

July 12, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, USA