nuclear-news

Southern boom town that is just 24 miles away from dangerous canyon contaminated by plutonium

By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com, 16 September 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13765533/canyon-contaminated-plutonium-santa-fe-boom-town.html

Residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico – less than a half-hour drive from the birthplace of the atomic bomb – are drinking from a water supply with alarming traces of plutonium, scientists have found.

The shocking samples were taken from Los Alamos’s soil just 24 miles from Santa Fe, which has roughly 90,000 residents.

Experts warned have since warned that the discovery could mean a rehabilitation project is necessary to save the city’s drinking water.

The contaminated soil can be found right on the cusp of Los Alamos, in the area’s appropriately named Acid Canyon, where radioactive waste seeped into the land from 1943 to 1964.

‘We need to permanently protect precious, irreplaceable groundwater and the Rio Grande while providing high-paying cleanup jobs for decades,’ said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch, in an email to Santa Fe New Mexican this past spring.

Pointing to maps showing the contaminated spots across an area of land, Coghlan asserted that there was proof a ‘genuine cleanup’ is needed. 

While the water in Santa Fe is still drinkable with its current levels of plutonium, Coghlan said the radioactive drinking water ‘should be of great concern to Northern New Mexicans’. 

In Santa Fe County, up to 3 picocuries per liter of plutonium were recorded in the water supply – twice the guideline set by the New Mexico Administrative Code, according to the outlet.

Nuclear Watch also compiled data plutonium contamination below the soil from 1992 and 2023 through plot points on a map.

Huge hot spots were found at dump sites of an old lab used for experiments. 

This, of course, was at Los Alamos’ National Laboratory, located a little more than a mile out of town, and one of 16 research and development sites used and owned by the United States Department of Energy. 

Contamination in surface water like streams and rivers has been traced back to places including the hiking trail Acid Canyon, where the lab discarded waste from 1943 to 1964.

Its past pollution could now be migrating down to the area’s unseen aquifer underground – likely bringing the pollutants across San Ildefonso Pueblo land and into the Rio Grande, Coghlan warned.

The river feeds into the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, a system of integrated infrastructure used to divert as much as 2.8 billion gallons of surface water to Santa Fe annually.

That water serves as nearly half of Santa Fe’s public drinking supply – a cause for concern, according to Coghlan.

Over the past 40 years, Santa Fe has seen its population almost double to roughly 90,000, leading it to earn the distinction of ‘boom town’ in a 2019 national survey.

In the years since, the city added roughly 5,000 residents, for an increase of about 6 percent as occupied homes and per capita income have also grown.

The news of Acid Canyon’s contamination comes almost 20 years after the Department of Energy and the University of California – the lab’s previous operator – made an agreement with the New Mexico Environment Department to clean up the contamination.

Spread out over decades, the efforts have so far been unsuccessful in remediating the fallout, data from Nuclear Watch shows – as the NMED seeks a full cleanup at one of the dump sites at a cost of over $800 million to protect Santa Fe’s drinking water.

As it stands, radiation levels are not high enough to hurt those walking the Acid Canyon trail, but Coghlan pointed out another danger that would happen if a fire broke out.

‘Were Acid Canyon to burn in a wildfire, and we know that threat is all too real, that could be dangerous in the form of respirable plutonium that is released to the air through wildfire,’ he said.

Warning the smoke inhaled could lead to lung cancer, Coghlan had his concerns echoed by the Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, Dr. Michael Ketterer.

‘I’m just trying to show New Mexicans what the truth is here,’ he said after collecting and analyzing plutonium samples from trailheads at Acid Canyon. ‘I see a lot of things to be concerned about here.’ 

We can’t really predict where it’s going to go and how bad it’s going to be,’ he continued, of the possibility of a fire creating deadly conditions in the area.

Surrounding communities could be at risk as well, including historic Santa Fe, as the shocking contamination data saw Ketterer question whether official warnings should be posted across the trail.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the United States,’ Ketterer. ‘This is an unrestricted area.’ 

He went on to compare radiation levels seen at the popular park to those at the site of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

‘It’s just an extreme example of very high concentrations of plutonium in soils and sediments,’ the biochemist said. ‘It’s hiding in plain sight.’

The biochemist also noted that high concentrations of plutonium in the canyon’s water posed wider environmental risks to communities and habitats downstream. 

‘Under monsoon storm flow conditions, Pu [plutonium] laden water and sediment flow through Acid Canyon and into Los Alamos Canyon and ultimately, the Rio Grande,’ he noted in a presentation for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.

Radioactive plutonium in ground water, Ketterer noted, can also be absorbed by plants where it enter the food chain via local veggie-eating herbivores, or spread as airborne ash following increasingly common wildfires. 

‘This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,’ the biochemist recently told The Guardian of the unsettling find.

Meanwhile, the cleanup of the lab’s Cold War sites is only half complete, the DOE reports. 

Should the department’s plans be finalized, all pits and shafts would be excavated and radioactive waste interred at Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. 

September 17, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | water