Whopping Expansion at Los Alamos National Labs

June 14, 2005

Welcome to New Mexico

We invest in nuclear;
P-Pits are our specialty.
We invest in WMD;
We make �em, ship �em, store �em.�

Bombs are the name of the game.
Our politics are the same.
Tons of unburied nuke waste
Under tents in rusting drums.

Plutonium glows in the sun.
In the land of nuclear fun.

But there�s very little security
At factories of nuclear purity.

Welcome to New Mexico.
Roll or bowl a P-pit
A penny a pitch.
Capitol of WMD, capital of WMD.

Introduction
LANL is permitted to burn 1,408 pounds yearly of depleted uranium (DU) in open pits. The amount is up from the May report of 528 pounds. But hopefully we have little danger of DU in Taos. The particles are so heavy they don�t blow the distance. Dispersion models find that the particles travel 50 meters. That�s the end of the good news. LANL is a bomb-making factory. The place is flowing with plutonium�from plutonium pits to unimaginable tons of high-level radioactive waste. And now the Department of Energy (DOE) is itching to expand into the world�s largest unregulated radioactive waste dump and create the Rocky Flats of tomorrow: a Modern Pit Facility.

Meanwhile, will the Taos Town Council sign the resolution supporting U.S. compliance with the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and the closure of the LANL nuclear waste dump? Los Alamos Study Group says Town Council support is very important. The vote is scheduled for June 28, after a presentation by Erlinda Gonzales, Town Council member and member of LANL�s Citizen�s Advisory Board (CAB).

If the Council fails to support the resolution, it is a vote in favor of the war machine, high-level radioactive waste, proliferation of nuclear warheads, terrorist threats, radioactive pollution and a philosophy of no more tomorrows.

Area G
The DOE wants to expand the LANL nuclear waste dump (Area G) from 63 to 93 acres in fall �05. Greg Mello, Director of Los Alamos Study Group, says this must be stopped. Why focus on Area G?�Fire, terrorism, environmental pollution, disease and proliferation are obvious concerns. Area G is said to have 2.5 million drums under three feet of sand. It�s located on the regional aquifer that supplies water to Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Pojoaque. Area G has never been licensed, regulated or permitted. Although the Attorney General says the site is operating illegally, neither Governor Bill Richardson, A.G. Patricia Madrid, nor the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has acted to do anything about it. At least something should be done about the estimated 50,000 drums of plutonium waste under huge white nylon tents sitting on the mesa before expanding Area G.

A chemical engineer and past member of CAB says that in �99, unidentified radioactive gas-filled canisters piled up near Area G. �They would puncture tiny holes in the canisters and draw samples for analysis in an attempt to determine the exact nature of the waste,� according to the engineer, who wrote in an extensive CAB memo that LANL needed to deal with waste-management situations �liable to have a major environmental impact on the surrounding communities.� For example, according to NMED reports, there is noticeable Tritium and Strontium 90 contamination of groundwater in Mortandad Canyon. It is generally known that this was dumped through a sewer outlet into the canyon.

Details of health concerns and other issues are found at the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety website www.nuclearactive.org. Look at �New Mexico�s Right to Know: The Impact of LANL Operations on Public Health and the Environment.� You will learn the Centers for Disease Control has found �the soil surrounding LANL may contain 100 times more plutonium than was previously estimated.� That�s just for starters.

Another major problem, according to Greg Mello and the Wall Street Journal, is poor security. Mello stated at a HUB meeting in Taos that on a scale of 1-10, LANL security is a 3. John Fialka writes in the Wall Street Journal that Army special-forces teams have tested security at LANL several times and demonstrated that �quick attacks by small, well-trained teams can penetrate department security forces and gain access to simulated nuclear materials used in the exercises.�

Rocky Flats Moves to LANL
Currently, LANL is the only source of plutonium pits in the United States These round, smooth grapefruit-sized pits are the trigger-explosive mechanism for W88 Poseidon submarine missiles. With Bush�s push to expand Star Wars nuclear capacity (�Bush�s New Nukes: Our Radioactive Future� in Earth Island Journal, Summer 2005) they need more than the 20 to 40 pits produced in LANL�s facility.

Pit production was brought down from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant when the FBI closed it for polluting the Denver-Boulder area, after faulty equipment created fires that released plutonium into the atmosphere. It had to be a critical scenario for the FBI to take action. The site was so contaminated the buildings and facilities were decontaminated and removed brick by brick. They are still working on closure. Guess what? According to an inside source, the DOE simply moved the Rocky Flats scientific personnel and pit-box equipment to LANL. Now LANL would like to win the government contract to build The Modern Pit Facility, capable of 450 pits per year, known as the new bomb factory.

The University of California stated in a letter to Hank Daneman in 1990 that plutonium production at LANL was a no-go. James Kane in the UC president�s office stated, �the University has no intention of managing a plutonium production facility. Our contract calls for research only.� Could this be an inside reason UC is out of the LANL management business?

Basically each pit is equal to a nuclear warhead. This is interesting, considering Article 6 of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed by the U.S., calling for nuclear disarmament. Town Council member Erlinda Gonzales is expected to urge the Council on the 28th to vote against a resolution supporting compliance with NPT and closure of the waste site. Why is this expected? In the past, when the CAB�appointed by DOE/LANL�has not supported LANL, it was removed from service. It is an interesting history, as reported to Horse Fly by a past chairman of the CAB.

CAB History
The purpose of the CAB, as set forth in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, is to identify environmental concerns of the local public, develop recommendations to prevent environmental degradation and to accelerate cleanup of legacy wastes. But this is not what occurs. A former long-term chairman of the CAB wrote in 1999 that the CAB was downgraded from �an independently aggressive board into a submissive one willing to sit placidly through the �dog and pony� shows staged by the DOE at the beginning of every board meeting.��DOE removed one entire CAB after it criticized LANL safety and waste management. LANL brought in new candidates and changed the bylaws for the purpose of �keeping the CAB within bounds.� The head of waste management quit because LANL was diverting money that was supposed to be going to waste management to other places. �LANL treated budget allocations as discretionary spending,� according to the former CAB chairman.

A DOE rep at LANL told me prospective CAB members are checked out by the site office manager and that DOE in Washington makes the final decisions on CAB membership. So it seems it would be most difficult to criticize �the boss� and keep the job for two years. I hope the Town Council keeps this in mind when listening to Gonzales� presentation on the waste site. Taose�os should take a moment to let the Town Council and Mayor know how you feel about the resolution for nonproliferation and against nuke factories and radioactive waste storage in northern New Mexico.

Conclusion: What You Can Do
When Oppenheimer moved the Manhattan Project from Chicago to the boys� school ranch at Los Alamos in �42, the spot was chosen because of its total isolation. This is certainly not the case in 2005. Northern New Mexico is no longer the morally correct place to continue expansion of a whopping big radioactive waste site and P-pit facility. Also, plutonium pit production creates so much radioactive waste, it would make sense to move it closer to the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in southeastern New Mexico.

On Aug. 6, the Los Alamos Study Group is sponsoring a Hiroshima commemoration celebration at Ashley Pond Park at Los Alamos, under the banner of �Stop the New Bomb Factory.� Call 505-265-1200 to volunteer. Food and lodging will be provided. This will be an exciting event with music, drama, poetry and teach-ins.

Diane Gledhill needs volunteers to sign up more local businesses to the Resolution. So far approximately 65 have signed. Contact her at 751-3016.
There are a number of northern New Mexico groups working to stop expansion at LANL:

��Los Alamos Study Group, www.lasg. org, 505-265-1200.
��Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, www.nuclearactive.org.
��Pax Christi New Mexico, www. paschristinewmexico.org, 758-1970.
��Nuclear Watch New Mexico, www. nukewatch.org (a wealth of timely documents on this website).