As wildfires in Texas ravaged the nation’s main nuclear weapons facility, staff scrambled to make sure there was nothing flammable around buildings and garage areas.
With the fires showing no signs of abating, the Pantex factory made an urgent appeal to local contractors, who arrived minutes later with bulldozers to dig trenches and widen the firebreaks of the sprawling complex where nuclear weapons are assembled and dismantled and the harmful plutonium pits (hollow spheres that cause nuclear damage). Warheads and bombs are stockpiled.
“Winds can pick up very (quickly) here and move very quickly,” said Jason Armstrong, head of Pantex’s federal office in Amarillo, who wakes up 40 hours straight to monitor risks. Workers were sent home and the plant closed. as smoke began to blanket the site.
Those February fires, including the largest in Texas history, were unsuccessful in Pantex, the flames spreading less than five kilometers. And Armstrong says it’s highly unlikely that the plutonium pits, stored in drums and fire-resistant shelters, would be hit. A wildfire.
But the scale and speed of grassland fires, as well as Pantex’s pressing response, underscore the magnitude of what’s at stake as the climate renews fuels, excessive heat and droughts, longer fire seasons with larger, more intense fires, and supercharged storms that can lead to catastrophic consequences. Inundaciones. La fire season in Texas begins in February, but farther west it hasn’t yet risen and usually worsens in the summer and fall.
Dozens of active or inactive laboratories and commercial and military facilities across the country that use, store, or are infected with radioactive tissues are vulnerable to excessive weather. Many also conduct critical energy and defense studies and production that can be disrupted or paralyzed by fires. , floods and other disasters.
There’s the 40-square-mile Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where a wildfire in 2000 burned within a half-mile (0. 8 kilometers) of a collection of radioactive waste. The heavily contaminated Santa Susana box lab in Southern California, where a wildfire broke out in 2018. burned 80% of the array narrowly missing an infected domain through a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959. And the plutonium-infected Hanford Nuclear Power Plant in Washington, D. C. , where the U. S. made atomic bombs.
“I think it’s still too early to recognize climate change and . . . how to address those excessive weather events,” said Paul Walker, program director of the environmental organization Green Cross International and a former member of the Armed House staff. “I think it’s too early to assume that we’ve solved all the worst-case scenarios. . . (because) what might have been 25 years ago probably won’t be anymore. “
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This understanding has begun to replace government threats at some of the country’s most sensitive sites.
In 2022, the Ministry of Energy asked its existing sites to assess climate change-related hazards for “critical purposes and operations,” adding waste storage and expanding plans to deal with them. He cited wildfires at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and a deep freeze in 2021 that ruptured Pantex’s “critical facilities. “
However, the company does not particularly take into consideration long-term climate hazards when granting entry permits or licenses for new sites or projects, or in environmental tests that are reviewed every five years, although they are rarely updated. considerations about how the sites themselves might withstand replacement, a paradox that critics consider myopic and potentially dangerous.
Similarly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission only takes into account old weather knowledge rather than long-term projections in licensing and monitoring decisions for nuclear power plants, according to an April General Accounting Office study that suggested the NRC “fully understands the potential effects of climate change. “The GAO found that 60 of the 75 U. S. They were in areas with a higher risk of flooding and 16 in areas with a higher likelihood of wildfires.
“We act as if. . . (what) happens now is what we can expect 50 years from now,” said Caroline Reiser, a weather and energy attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The truth of our climate has dramatically replaced, and we want to replace our planning. . . before experiencing more and more excessive weather events. “
The National Nuclear Safety Administration’s Division of Environmental Safety and Health, which oversees DOE’s active sites, will hold an internal meeting and convene a task force to expand “crucial” methodologies for addressing climate hazards in permitting, licensing and site-wide assessments, John Weckerle, the division’s director of environmental regulatory affairs, he told The Associated Press.
The firm said last year that climate change could simply “jeopardize the NNSA project and pose a risk to national security. “
“We all know the climate is changing. Everyone is asking what effect we have on the climate,” Weckerle said. Now we have to reverse the situation and say, ‘Okay. . . But what do we think will happen because of the weather at a specific site?”
Pre- and post-construction project testing is critical to protecting infrastructure and waste, said Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“We know that climate change makes it more likely that those events will occur more frequently, which will have unprecedented consequences,” Spaulding said. Sites “can be larger if those issues are anticipated ahead of time. “
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One of the most harmful radioactive materials is plutonium, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power protection at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It can cause cancer, is most harmful when inhaled and a few hundred grams scattered on a giant scale can pose a significant risk, he said.
Experts say the threats are spread throughout the site. Most plutonium and other radioactive curtains are contained in concrete and metal structures or underground garages designed to resist fire. And many sites are located in giant spaces in remote spaces where the threat to the public from a radiation release would be minimal.
Despite this, threats have emerged.
In 2000, a wildfire burned a third of the 1,502-square-kilometer Hanford site, which produced plutonium for the U. S. atomic weapons program and is the country’s most radioactive site.
Air tracking detected plutonium in populated spaces near degrees above background noise, but only for one day and at non-hazardous degrees, according to a report from the Washington State Department of Health.
The firm said the plutonium likely arrived here from the windblown ground surface and after the fire, though site officials said the radioactive waste is buried several meters deep or stored in concrete structures.
Because the Hanford site is prone to fires (with 130 wildfires between 2012 and 2023), officials say they are diligent about cutting firebreaks and flammable vegetation.
The Woolsey Fire in California in 2018 is another red flag.
About 150,000 people live within 8 kilometers of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a former site for nuclear energy studies and rocket engine testing.
The chimney burned several hundred feet from infected buildings and soil, and about 600 feet (183 meters) from where a nuclear reactor core partially melted 65 years ago.
The state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control said sampling across multiple agencies did not reveal any external radiation or other hazardous materials attributable to the fire. But another study, with many samples collected by volunteers, found radioactive microparticles in the ash just outside the site. the barriers in the lab and at three more remote sites that investigators say stem from the fire.
The state ordered the demolition of 18 buildings, which posed “an imminent and significant danger to other people and the environment, as unforeseen and most likely fires can lead to the release of radioactive and hazardous substances. “
He also ordered the cleanup of old fires infected with radioactive materials. Although the land was covered with permeable tarps and did not burn in 2018, the state warned that it could be destroyed by “much more severe” wildfires, strong winds or flooding. .
“It’s like those places where we think it’s never going to happen,” said Melissa Bumstead, founder and co-director of the Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab. “But. . . Things are changing very quickly. “
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said he and others succeeded in urging federal nuclear protection officials to come up with a wildfire plan on a final environmental impact for Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999.
The following year, the 48,000-acre (19,000-hectare) Cerro Grande Fire burned 7,500 acres (3,035 hectares) in the laboratory, added structures, and came within a half-mile (0. 8 kilometer) of a domain with more than 24,000 inhabitants. Shredded boxes containing basically plutonium-contaminated waste.
The plan’s hypothetical chimney “eerily matched the genuine chimney,” Coghlan said, adding that “it could have been catastrophic” if the boxes had been compromised and the plutonium had been in the air. But the lab had shut down the chimneys in the area, and from then on, of course, most of the boxes were sent to a permanent garage in southern New Mexico.
The rest of the radioactivity (adding that of the World War II Manhattan Project) is now underground, with barriers to prevent leaching, or in boxes stored under fireproof cloth and metal domes with paved floors until they can be processed for disposal.
The number of radioactive curtains in the container is kept low to prevent a large release in the event of a compromise, said Nichole Lundgard, nuclear engineering and protection program manager for DOE contractor N3B.
The lab also emphasizes fire preparedness, adding thinning forests to the intensity of long-lasting fires, said Rich Nieto, the site’s wildfire program manager.
“What used to be a three-month (fire) season, will be a six-month season,” he said.
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Wildfires aren’t the only climate-related risk. Flooding caused by increasingly heavy torrential rains can wash away sediments, especially in spaces that have been burned. Flooding and excess blood can also damage operations and have forced the closure of several DOE sites in recent years.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California was evacuated because of a wildfire in 2020, and last year the lab was forced to close for 3 weeks due to heavy flooding.
The Los Alamos fire in 2000 was caused by heavy rains that washed sediments with plutonium and other radioactive materials.
In 2010, Pantex was flooded with 25 centimeters of rain that forced the plant to close, affecting operations for about a month. The plutonium garage area was flooded and corrosion was subsequently discovered in some containers, which has since been “resolved,” Armstrong said. the box office manager.
In 2017, storms flooded nuclear curtain processing facilities and caused power outages that affected a chimney’s alarm panel.
Then, in 2021, Pantex shut down for a week due to excessive blood infusion that authorities said led to “freeze-related disruptions” at 10 nuclear facilities and other plants. Garage area with cover.
Since then, Pantex has followed frost protection measures and a cold weather reaction plan. And Armstrong says innovations have been made in its electric and chimney cover systems and the installation of backup generators.
Other DOE sites are also investing in infrastructure, the nuclear agency’s Weckerle said, because what was once considered would likely now be vulnerable.
“We are in a time of increased risk,” he said. That’s just the core of the challenge (and). . . A lot of it has to do with climate change. “
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The Associated Press has been criticized by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Outrider Foundation for its nuclear safety policy. The AP is only guilty of all the content.
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