UPDATE – (Added from the New Mexico Department of Environment).
When the coronavirus and the resulting Covid-19 pandemic closed in mid-March, TA-54 was one of many places where virtually all activity was halted.
Zone 54 is from the National Laboratories of Los Alamos (LANL) in New Mexico, the same Los Alamos that housed the Manhattan Project, which marked the beginning of the atomic age and continues to produce radioactive triggers for nuclear weapons today.
Inside TA-54 is the so-called Zone G. The federal government calls the “waste control domain inherited from LANL.” For more than 60 years, it has been a domain for the storage, remedy and elimination of various types of radioactive and poisonous WASTE of LANL.
TA-54 and Area G occupy a swath of shrubs in the desert between major laboratories and the White Rock network. And all the places I’ve discussed are on the most sensible Bird plateau overlooking the mighty Rio Grande and the city of Santa Fe in the distance.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency He provided me with a list of sites across the country that suspended monitoring and reporting what they were releasing in local watersheds under the Clean Water Act. Facilities with release permits were allowed to suspend their reports of water pollutants, starting in March, as a component of a transitory policy that halted the implementation of the country’s key environmental legislation due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The list included a number of recognizable facilities, such as Boston’s Logan International Airport, a number of water-polluting plants in New York, coal mines, sawmills, recycling facilities, hospitals, schools and even a Waffle House in Louisiana.
But the 4 characters in the list of 352 that didn’t show me were: TA54.
The TA-54 and Area G are specially indexed among polluting sites across the country that have been monitored for approximately 3 months this year, while humanity turned to Covid-19.
I have the idea of the site, perched on top of the Rio Grande, adjacent to the village of San Ildefonso and near the Buckman well formula that supplies Santa Fe with much of its drinking water.
I stood on the banks of the Rio Grande next to the Buckman Property and saw the Bird and the White Rock above. It is a quiet and charming place. And it’s easy to see how anything from there can seamlessly pass to one of the continent’s top vital rivers with a little thanks to the annual monsoon rains or seasonal thaw.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), the contractor that manages the clean-up of TA-54 in cooperation with the Department of Energy and LANL told me that those operations “were reduced to Essential Mission Critical Activities (EMCA) on March 24, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“As a result, most… field work was suspended at the time, includ(ing) the majority of the groundwater and surface water monitoring work. The suspension of these field activities presented no risk to human health or the environment.”
The New Mexico Department of Environment (NMED) is also conducting its own air, water, soil, sediment and biota tests to check for symptoms of contamination in the lab, however, this follow-up was also discontinued in mid-March and is just beginning to restart. while summer monsoons are consolidating.
“Groundwater samples are likely to be compensated as the N3B catches up to ensure that all wells are sampled before the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30, 2020,” Maddy Hayden, NMED’s data manager, told me. “In addition, we are just entering our peak intense sampling season when the monsoon season begins and we collect samples of stormwater runoff. We didn’t miss any stormwater sample meetings.”
Among the activities that were interrupted, a main task to extract chromium-infected water, a heavy poisonous and carcinogenic steel, from the floor through a series of wells, to treat it and inject it back into the soil at another location.
Chromium is not the result of the production of nuclear weapons, but of wastewater from a non-nuclear power plant that was discharged into a canyon north of TA-54 along the san Ildefonso Pueblo border decades ago.
N3B says it resumed normal groundwater monitoring on June 8 and that its chromium remediation paints began to increase on July 6 until a permanent solution can be implemented.
“Groundwater situations are unlikely to particularly replace a 3-month closure as groundwater moves very slowly in depth,” NMED’s Hayden said.
But according to Joni Arends, co-founder and CEO of Citizens Concerned about Nuclear Safety, “one wonders if LANL set degrees of water the moment the formula is closed and recently restarted.
Arends says it is also involved that restarting surface water tracking is a slow process.
“Monsoons this week, so stormwater runs through the canyons to the Rio Grande.”
N3B said that some surface water monitoring, which is carried out with gun-trained surveillance cameras, can continue while all other surveillance measures were stopped on the floor.
“Given LANL’s history it’s imperative that monitoring be robustly resumed,” Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said in an email. “This is after all the Lab that use to claim that groundwater contamination was impossible… Now we know of heavy chromium and high explosives groundwater contamination which are a harbinger for more contaminants to come.”
In 1980, the Department of Energy published a report indicating that there is no way for infected water from laboratories to succeed in the aquifer. In 2005, the DOE absolutely reversed this position, arguing that pollution can be an ongoing challenge for decades, if not centuries.
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I have covered science, technology, environment and policy for CNET, PC World, BYTE, Wired, AOL and NPR. I wrote eBooks on Android and Alaska.