Los Alamos cleanup crew dodges explosives, radioactive waste
Wed, Oct 28 2009 at 10:02 AM EST
Read more: TOXINS & CHEMICALS, WASTE
Photo: Sixty-five years ago, as scientists furtively built the world’s first atomic bomb, they disposed of dangerous, toxic waste at this six-acre dump in Los Alamos, N.M. Now, a cleanup crew is gingerly picking through the waste in an attempt to clean it up, a process paid for with $212 million in federal stimulus money.
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DiggIn the 1940s, when scientists first assembled for The Manhattan Project, an Allied program to develop nuclear weapons, this dumpsite was just an isolated mesa in the desert. Now, a town has sprung up around it — including three businesses right across the street.
Ken Romero, a machinist at the Jona Manufacturing Company, recently observed a startling reminder of just how dangerous the site remains.
“You wonder what’s going on,” he told the New York Times. “One day we looked across the street and there was a guy in a full-body white suit, and he was just 100 yards away from us.”
The decontamination team consulted scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who came up with worst-case scenarios regarding the danger of the chemicals at the site, known as Technical Area 21, and then blew up the equivalent amounts of dynamite to test their safety measures.
Officials are treating the area with extreme care, as they don’t even know exactly what they’re going to find under the layers of dirt and gravel. They suspect it may hold a truck that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated.
The Los Alamos site isn’t the only nuclear waste site slated for cleanup. Other sites that will benefit from the $6 billion nuclear cleanup program include the Hanford site in Washington and a Savannah River site in South Carolina.
But that’s just a drop in the bucket considering the hundreds of toxic waste sites that remain, which take up as much land as Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Clean up of all 107 sites is expected to take decades and up to $260 billion to complete.
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Comments(3)
Posted By Gregory Cragg - Wed, Oct 28 2009 at 6:38 PM ESTSimple Nuclear Waste Safe Storage Solution
From what I read I have the only viable solution to safely store nucear and radioactive wastes and it does not cost anywhere near what the US plans on spending to cleanup these sites.
Posted By John - Thu, Oct 29 2009 at 5:00 PM ESTsimple solution?
OK, Gregory, I'll bite. What do you have in mind? We surely do need some creative thinking!
proceed with caution
I live within a mile of this site, and I frequent the many (more than 3) businesses across from it, including Jona Manufacturing, an equipment rental business, the town newspaper, a lumberyard, and others. As a radioactive waste professional, I am aghast that the Dept. of Energy has not moved these businesses elsewhere, at DOE expense, while they execute the cleanup of Material Disposal Area B, one of about 26 such MDAs owned by DOE and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Given the fact that no one.... More