A nuclear legacy in Los Alamos

After three cleanups, independent analysis shows 80-year-old plutonium persists in Acid Canyon and beyond

Searchlight New Mexico, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, August 15, 2024

The world’s oldest documented plutonium contamination may not lie not in the Chihuahuan Desert at the Trinity Site, where the first-ever atomic bomb ripped open the skies and melted the sand into green glass. Rather, that distinction more likely goes to Los Alamos’s Acid Canyon, according to an independent study by Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University.

Ketterer announced these findings at an online press conference held by Nuclear Watch New Mexico on Aug. 15, after collecting and analyzing soil, water and plant samples in Acid Canyon, a popular hiking area in the middle of town. Beginning in 1943, the year the Manhattan Project came to Los Alamos, workers released radioactive waste into the canyon. Three remediations would follow, but as Ketterer’s analysis found, “a super weapons-grade” plutonium persists in the soil, water and plant life in and around Los Alamos, representing some of the earliest ever made.

One thought came to his mind as he analyzed samples from the area, collected last month: “I’ve never seen anything like this in any samples anywhere,” he told Searchlight New Mexico in an interview.

Scientists in the niche community of nuclear forensics can identify the point of origin of a particular nuclear material based on its composition of isotopes, a process called fingerprinting. Ketterer believes his findings prove unequivocally that legacy plutonium from Los Alamos National Laboratory has not only remained in Acid Canyon all these years later, but also migrated beyond, even after the cleanups. “It’s just a ribbon of contamination going down to the Rio,” he said.

Using a technology called mass spectrometry, Ketterer said this scenario became apparent after he found that several samples from scattered sites in Acid Canyon — whose trailhead is tucked behind the Los Alamos County Aquatic Center — had the same fingerprint, one that dated to the earliest days of the Manhattan Project. He realized just how far that plutonium had traveled when he also collected the identical fingerprint in Los Alamos Canyon, some 12 miles southeast of Acid Canyon, near the Phillips 66 gas station in Totavi — washed downhill by monsoon rains.

The contaminants’ ultimate destination, he wrote in his brief report, is the Rio Grande, where plutonium has already been detected. His results confirm the findings of a 2024 study by Nuclear Watch New Mexico that used data culled from LANL’s online database, Intellus New Mexico, to map plutonium contamination around Los Alamos………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://searchlightnm.org/a-nuclear-legacy-in-los-alamos/#:~:text=Ketterer%20believes%20his%20findings%20prove,the%20Rio%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said.