A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
My favorite nuclear disaster! Criticality events.<p>I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure tent and cleaned up at a cost of 2-3 billion. Apparently the government had dumped an unknown quantity of high level nuclear waste there in an unlined pit in the dirt in the 40s. This led me to research the history of the area.<p>After a couple of months I figured out that my house in White Rock was about 3/4 of a mile from the current waste dump for the entire lab, known as TA-53 or MDA-C or something. They were in the process of excavating the three 200 foot deep pits of MDA-C - one for low level nuclear waste, one for transuranic (as they call “high level” these days) and one for classified waste. If I stood on my roof I could see the negative pressure tents surrounding them. My favorite non-classified project which was disposed of there was the “experimental high temperature plutonium reactor”, from the 90s.<p>The lab has some rather interesting history. There was no concept at all of safely disposing of anything or even recording what they dumped and where until the 60s. The first ever radioactive metal working facility, out on a ridge by the entrance to town (TA 21? 23?) dumped all of their wastewater directly into the canyon untreated. This has recently been cleaned up at a cost of several billion dollars also, and now they are building homes there. The heavy/radioactive metal plumes went down into the earth over 500 feet. In fact, all of the waste from the entire lab used to be dumped into a stream in the middle of town. They cleaned it up, opened it as a park (“Acid Canyon”), then after heavy rains found some barrels they missed which were determined to contain plutonium waste. Oops, cleaned that up some more and now it’s a nature preserve and hiking area. There are still untouched facilities from the 50s where Feynman worked on polonium experiments sitting a few hundred feet from the banks of the Rio Grande.<p>There was a power plant right on the edge of a native reservation neighboring the lab. According to the federal government, the plume of chromium contamination it left ends exactly on the property line of the lab to the reservation.<p>Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them.