For years, the public had no clear picture of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium footprint. Had the ubiquitous plutonium at LANL infiltrated the soil? The water? Had it migrated outside the boundary of the laboratory itself?
A series of maps published by Nuclear Watch New Mexico are beginning to answer these questions and chart the troubling extent of plutonium on the hill. One map is included below, while an interactive version appears on Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s website. The raw data for both comes from Intellus New Mexico, a publicly accessible clearinghouse of some 16 million environmental monitoring records offered in recent decades by LANL, the New Mexico Environment Department and the Department of Energy.
Approximately 58,100 red dots populate each map at 12,730 locations, marking a constellation of points where plutonium — a radioactive element used in nuclear weapons — was found in the groundwater, surface water or soil. What’s alarming is just how far that contamination extends, from Bandelier National Monument to the east and the Santa Fe National Forest to the north, to San Ildefonso tribal lands in the west and the Rio Grande River and Santa Fe County, to the south.
The points, altogether, tell a story about the porous boundary between LANL and its surrounds. So pervasive is the lab’s footprint that plutonium can be found in both trace and notable amounts along hiking trails, near a nursing home, in parks, along major thoroughfares and in the Rio Grande.
Gauging whether or not the levels of plutonium are a health risk is challenging: Many physicians and advocates say no dose of radiation is safe. But when questions about risk arise, one of the few points of reference is the standard used at Rocky Flats in Colorado, where the maximum allowable amount of plutonium in remediated soil was 50 picocuries per gram. Many sites on the Nuclear Watch map have readings below this amount. Colorado’sconstruction standard, by contrast, is 0.9 picocuries per gram.
Nuclear Watch’s driving question, according to Scott Kovac, its operations and research director, concerned a specific pattern of contamination: Had plutonium migrated from LANL dump sites into regional groundwater? The answer, Kovac believes, is yes.
That conclusion began to form when Nuclear Watch compiled data from between 1992 and 2023 for plutonium contamination below the soil, and plotted each point into the organization’s now-sprawling map. Red dots coalesce at LANL dump sites. They also appear in the finger-like canyons surrounding the Pajarito Plateau, namely in Los Alamos Canyon, “the main contaminant pathway to the Rio Grande,” a Nuclear Watch summary says.
Much of the contamination likely occurred from the 1940s to the 1960s, during the lab’s “Wild West,” in Kovac’s words — a time of little environmental oversight when the surrounding plateaus, canyons and the entire ancestral Pueblo of Tsirege doubled as a dumping ground, laboratory and wasteland.
The map doesn’t make conclusions about what, exactly, caused contamination at any given site. The sites themselves are chosen for sampling based on “legacy LANL operations” — areas where contamination occurred in the past — a Department of Energy spokesperson told Searchlight New Mexico in an email.
A 1999 environmental impact statement and other documents reveal the extent of that contamination and the many places where LANL buried radioactive waste or dumped effluent, including landfills, canyons, drain lines, firing sites and spill locations.
“Plutonium and uranium have been released into canyons…since the Manhattan Project,” according to another 1999 report, this one focused on the lab’s contribution to radioactive contamination in Cochiti Lake. “In Los Alamos Canyon, these contaminants have been carried by flood flows several tens of kilometers” — more than 12 miles — “downstream into the Rio Grande.”
Airborne plutonium releases were also frequent and largely unchecked until the late 1970s, other reports show. The legacy of contamination has been the subject of some piecemeal remediation efforts on lab property and public lands. But the maps stand as forceful arguments for a “genuine cleanup” that is comprehensive and lasting, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch.
“We need to permanently protect precious, irreplaceable groundwater and the Rio Grande while providing high-paying cleanup jobs for decades,” Coghlan wrote Searchlight in an email. Instead, the lab is focusing on a historic expansion to produce plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. “New Mexicans,” he said, “don’t need more nuclear weapons.”
‘A full reckoning’ of detritus
The lab’s campus is undeniably riddled with plutonium, including beneath the deep groundwater aquifer in certain of its technical areas, the map shows. One concentration appears on the campus’s northern flank, around Material Disposal Area C, a 12-acre site that served as the primary dump for plutonium and other radioactive and toxic waste between 1948 and 1973. The unlined dump comprised seven disposal pits and 108 shafts that workers dug directly into the tuff, burying cyanide, mercury, sulfuric acid, beryllium, plutonium and other wastes four to 25 feet deep.
In 2005, the Department of Energy and the University of California — the lab’s former operator — signed a consent order with the New Mexico Environment Department, agreeing to clean up the contamination. In 2016, another consent order followed. Under that agreement, the DOE was also required “to maintain a publicly accessible database, Intellus,” an NMED spokesperson told Searchlight.
Today, the NMED is seeking a full cleanup at the Material Disposal Area C dump at a cost of over $800 million, a move the agency said was necessary to provide maximum safeguards to the public and to drinking water. Should the department’s plans be finalized, all pits and shafts would be excavated and radioactive waste interred at Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. It would become a model, advocates believe, for cleanup efforts at LANL’s other dumps.
The lab is juggling this legacy cleanup at the same time that it’s attempting to make 30 plutonium pits per year by 2030, a mission described as the “new Manhattan Project.” Worker shortages and supply-chain bottlenecks have already derailed the timeline; meanwhile, the cleanup of the lab’s Cold War sites is only half complete, the DOE reports. Indeed, as the lab barrels toward a new Cold War, there hasn’t been a full reckoning with the detritus of the last one.
Contamination near Buckman
The lab’s unlined waste dumps are potential points of origin for plutonium contamination in the groundwater and the aquifer, the maps and other data suggest. Meanwhile, contamination in surface water like streams and rivers comes from sources like Acid Canyon, where the lab discharged treated and untreated radioactive waste from 1943 to 1964.
The site was remediated beginning in the 1970s and is now home to a popular hiking trail, but remnants of past pollution could be migrating down Los Alamos Canyon, across San Ildefonso Pueblo land and into the Rio Grande, said Coghlan. The river then feeds into the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, which delivers up to nearly half of Santa Fe’s public drinking water.
A handful of pollution points can also be seen in Bandelier National Monument and San Ildefonso and Cochiti tribal lands. One cluster of dots is in the middle of Cochiti Lake, some nine miles from the lab.
The federal government has long acknowledged that radionuclides and other contaminants can reach people who live “off-site.” Such pollutants, a 1999 environmental impact statement said, can migrate “through infiltration into alluvial aquifers, airborne dispersion of particulate matter, and sediment migration from surface-water runoff.” The red dots in the maps reflect these types of pathways as they scatter far beyond LANL’s campus.
Other points appear in unexpected corners across town, including a handful at the North Mesa Sports Complex, at mundane street corners and near the Sombrillo Retirement and Rehabilitation Center.
In most cases, the readings were below, for example, the maximum of 50 picocuries per gram allowed in remediated soil at Rocky Flats in Colorado — a Superfund site. In terms of health risks, such a number translates to one additional person in 500,000 getting cancer, according to the Government Accountability Office. New Mexico’s standard for the Rio Grande Basin, for another example, is 1.5 picocuries per liter. The Physicians for Social Responsibility argues that “there is no safe level of radionuclide exposure.”
On the low end, an Intellus sample might show a mere fraction of a picocurie, an amount so infinitesimally small that it could be attributed to “background,” or the fallout deposited into the atmosphere by above-ground nuclear tests. The readings included in Nuclear Watch’s map were filtered to show only those above background levels and at depths greater than six inches.
While the Intellus database offers location identifications, coordinates and some notes, the data can be tricky for a layperson to navigate. The accompanying notes are often brief, specialized and lacking in necessary context, potentially leading to misperceptions. In one case, for example, the data pointed to shocking levels of plutonium at coordinates that correspond to 1900 Diamond Dr., a complex in the heart of Los Alamos and home to a gymnastics center for kids.
One sample at the location held 10,100 picocuries per gram of plutonium 239/240, a concentration that “would typify materials like trinitite,” the greenish-colored glass produced when the world’s first atomic test melted the desert floor, according to Michael Ketterer, a professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University and a volunteer consultant for Nuclear Watch. Another earlier sample had some 7.7 million picocuries per liter of plutonium 238, an especially dangerous radioactive material when inhaled. A layperson seeing this data could come to the wrong conclusion that horrific amounts of plutonium were somewhere nearby and very accessible to the public.
Only after emails and phone calls to the DOE’s Environmental Management Field office and the NMED could the mystery of the readings be solved: This building is also the office of the lab’s legacy cleanup contractor N3B, where samples from highly radioactive containers of solid waste found elsewhere are kept before they are shipped to other labs for analysis.
There are startlingly high samples at coordinates within lab property that appear to abut public lands, according to Intellus. A 2011 soil sample contained 2.2 million picocuries per gram of plutonium 239/240 somewhere at a site off DP Road, across from a hardware store and a CrossFit gym, the data showed. Remediation has since occurred along the road.
Data dump
LANL has long championed Intellus New Mexico as emblematic of the lab’s policy of openness and data transparency. Intellus gives the public “real-time access to the most recent data used by managers, analysts, and scientists to help guide environmental stewardship decisions,” LANL’s website asserts. To ensure quality control, N3B sends the samples to independent and federally accredited laboratories for analysis, a DOE spokesperson told Searchlight. The results are then reviewed internally by chemists following EPA guidelines. While there is some criticism of the database’s unfriendliness, the findings within it are valid, the DOE says.
But the data, for all that it offers in sheer volume, is raw and largely uninterpreted. “It’s like in the movies where the plaintiff’s attorney representing the little person puts in a discovery request to the big corporate defendant and they get a semi-trailer truck full of documents,” said Ketterer.
Another troubling issue is that the Intellus data has reported plutonium activity “in extraordinarily high figures, while the result is nonetheless identified as “‘not detected,’” Ketterer wrote in a recent letter to the NMED, which called on LANL to use best scientific practices. The risk is that a database user could dismiss the non-detectable levels altogether or attribute them to “background values,” amounts akin to plutonium dispersed by atmospheric tests between 1945 and 1963, and not to the lab’s own operations.
For the sake of clarity, Ketterer believes LANL should use mass spectrometry, a technology that can precisely fingerprint the source of plutonium, as it’s done in the past. “There’s a way to test the samples to say ‘this is from us and this is from fallout,’” he said in an interview.
‘Between the dots’
The origins of the Nuclear Watch map began in 2020, when five engineering undergraduates and an associate professor, Seth Tuler, from Boston’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute began modeling Intellus sampling data, with Nuclear Watch’s oversight. The students traced how two contaminants — plutonium and hexavalent chromium — migrated from LANL to points beyond, and then translated the research into a map.
While the Worcester team faced challenges with the database, their findings were clear: “Environmental sampling has demonstrated that plutonium has leaked into the surrounding soil and groundwater over time,” their final report concluded. “This has created a toxicity problem, one that now shows evidence of faster-than-anticipated migration.”
When the students concluded their research, Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch decided to continue it, this time with a tight focus on plutonium. For him, the swaths of red dots answer some critical questions, but evoke even more about what the maps don’t show — the places where plutonium has yet to be discovered. “How much did they actually catch and how much is actually getting by undetected?’” Kovac wonders. “What’s between the dots?”
