Abstract
In a coincidence so close it was downright eerie, the ferocious 2000 fire season in the western United States saw two American nuclear weapons facilities hit by wildfires in less than two months. First a forest fire invaded Los Alamos National Laboratory in mid-May; and then, in late June, a fast-moving range fire swept through the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. (In July, another fire briefly threatened another nuclear facility, the Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory.)
May 11: Los Alamos threatened by fire.
No buildings housing radioactive or chemical materials were burned down or even seriously threatened by the fires. But outdoor areas tainted with contaminated soil and vegetation were scorched. As a result, radioactive and chemical contaminants were released into the air—although apparently not in high enough concentrations to pose a public health hazard.
The lesson from these two blazes should not be that wildfires are not hazardous enough to trigger potentially dangerous releases of contaminants from Energy Department nuclear sites. Instead, the fires should be viewed as a wake-up call for Energy and the sites themselves to be better prepared for wildfires in the future. The fact of the matter is, as frightening as these fires were, they could easily have been much worse.
Had the winds been blowing from the west rather than the south, the full force of the Cerro Grande fire— as the New Mexico conflagration was dubbed—would have exploded directly onto the laboratory's thickly wooded western fringe. Had that occurred, a wall of flame would have quickly roared into the heart of the laboratory, in all probability incinerating buildings containing sizeable inventories of radioactive materials and toxic substances. An outdoor storage and disposal site containing large amounts of ignitable plutonium waste would likely also have been torched. As it was, firefighters had to scramble to protect this site, called Area G. The flank fires— blazes spreading out from the main body of fire that burned onto the lab— were for the most part of low to moderate intensity.
At Hanford, the fire burned within 3,000 feet of an outdoor storage area containing 350 barrels of chemical and radioactive wastes immersed in mineral oil. According to Tom Carpenter, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a Seattle watchdog group, the drums are so flammable that if a single one were to ignite, it would be impossible to extinguish the flames.
“The fire would just rage. Flames would shoot 20 to 30 feet in the air and it could explode. It would have been very ugly” if all the drums had caught fire, Carpenter said.
The reason the fire didn't burn into the area, which contains dry grass, is simply that the winds died down. “It was pure and simple luck. They dodged a bullet,” Carpenter added. The barrels, according to Carpenter, are illegally stored and should be removed to a safer locale.
Actually, Hanford only partially dodged a bullet, as the fire swept directly over three contaminated sites. Two of them are dried-out ponds where slightly contaminated water was dumped from the 1950s to the 1970s. Federal and state officials have voiced little concern about those two sites. People are more concerned about the cryptically named B/C Cribs area, where about 40 million gallons of moderately radioactive fluids were dumped from 1956 to 1958 and from 1962 to 1967. One of the trenches alone contains 100 grams of plutonium.
Initial air monitoring when the fire was still burning showed no signs of radioactive releases. But 36 of 76 air samples taken in and around the Hanford site about three weeks after the fire showed elevated levels of radioac-tivity—possibly from radioactive dust blowing in the wind from the denuded landscape.
“Maybe the greatest danger is after the fire, from the wind blowing the dust,” said Carpenter. Perhaps. But the levels detected at the end of July were far below concentrations that could pose a health concern, according to Hanford officials. (Additional testing was in the works at the time this article was written.)
At Los Alamos, officials denied for weeks after the Cerro Grande fire that any laboratory contamination had escaped into the smoke plume. They claimed that the elevated radiation readings captured by the labs' network of air monitors—readings ranging from three to 10 times above normal— had two sources: the radiant energy of the fire itself, and lingering fallout contamination from Cold War-era above-ground nuclear tests (contamination that exists worldwide).
Lab spokesmen had to back off from that claim after the New Mexico Environment Department conducted an in-depth isotopic analysis of air filter samples taken during the week of May 10-17, when the fire was burning. The state found that at least two air monitors picked up small amounts of plutonium, depleted uranium, and americi-um (a byproduct of decaying plutonium). John Parker, chief of the department's Energy Department oversight bureau, said the levels detected were much too low to pose a health con-cern—they were so small that there is some doubt as to whether the readings were real. “It's a very small number and people shouldn't be concerned. If it's real, though, it suggests that indeed there was a release.”
The fact that contaminants were detected near Area G, an outdoor storage and disposal area containing plutonium, is further evidence that these were laboratory contaminants, according to Parker. “The proximity to Area G is such that one could develop a scenario where the origin of [the air contamination] could have been a lab operation.”
It wasn't until early July, at a public meeting in Santa Fe, that a lab official, Lee McAtee, director of the environmental health and safety division, finally said publicly that laboratory contaminants had escaped in the fire. He said he based that statement on knowledge of the contaminated areas that were burned—not on the air monitors, which, he said, did not provide clear evidence of a release.
Air pollution is not the only concern at Los Alamos. Because the Cerro Grande fire denuded large portions of the mountains behind the 43-square mile lab, there is a tremendous risk of massive erosion and flash flooding through the canyons that come down out of the mountains, cross the lab site, and drain into the Rio Grande. The laboratory has used these canyons as dumping grounds ever since the days of the Manhattan Project, so there is real concern that large amounts of contaminants could get washed into the river that supplies most of New Mexico with water.
As of late July, the flooding had been minimal; the torrential “monsoon” rains that normally begin around the July 4 holiday had yet to arrive in force. Lab officials have maintained that there is not enough contamination in the canyon bottoms to pose a health risk, but critics charge that no one knows with certainty how much contamination there is in the canyons.
The lab has taken steps to reduce the runoff—excavating contaminated soil from the bottom of one canyon and building a 70-foot-high, $7 million dam in another. While these efforts should reduce the damage of floods, if the laboratory weren't 10 years behind in its environmental cleanup program, many of the 600 or so contaminated sites that were disturbed by the fire would not be vulnerable to erosion and would not now pose a threat.
Perhaps the group that should be most concerned about the health effects of the fire are the more than 1,000 firefighters who fought the two blazes. While some specially trained firefighters at both Los Alamos and Hanford were equipped with respirators designed to protect them from breathing in toxic particles, the vast majority were not.
“If I were one of the firefighters at Los Alamos, I'd be worried I got a snootful of beryllium,” commented Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official, referring to the non-radioactive but highly dangerous metal that is used to boost the explosive power of nuclear bombs—and a substance that is present in laboratory soil and vegetation.
Alvarez, who until last year served as an adviser to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, has emerged as perhaps the leading critic of the Energy Department's handling of the two fires, which he believes the department, Los Alamos, and Hanford were all poorly prepared for. In terms of the firefighters, Alvarez believes they should have been treated like radiation workers and outfitted with radiation detectors to measure their exposures. He believes they should also have undergone urinalysis to determine if they ingested radioactive materials. (Both Los Alamos and Hanford have offered to conduct urinalysis tests for the firefighters, but so far there have been few takers.)
Alvarez said that Los Alamos and Hanford are not the only places in the nuclear weapons complex that are located in fire-prone areas. The heavily contaminated Savannah River Site in South Carolina is in the middle of a thick forest. And, Alvarez adds, a major portion of the 189 tons of highly enriched uranium at the Oak Ridge Y-12 weapons plant in Tennessee is combustible and stored in old wooden buildings.
In other words, what happened this fire season could happen again.