The Lab has made 10 plutonium pits in the past without the proposed $6 billion Nuclear Facility, and is approved to make up to 20. This is 20 more than is needed. The Lab has only produced maybe 1 to 3 per year in the last couple of years. There is no need for a new building that would increase plutonium pit production capacity when so few are being made now and none are needed.

NNSA and LANL have already started making plans to do without. There are plans to increase the plutonium loading in the brand new 200,000 square foot RLUOB “Rad Lab,” and this modern facility will give 300+ current employees new offices. The existing plutonium facility, PF-4, is being upgraded and cleaned out. Livermore Lab can still perform some sampling work. There are plans to store excess plutonium at the Nevada Site. Existing facilities are more than adequate, especially as we head toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

Not to mention that LANL is located in a seismically active zone beside a dormant volcano and an active rift. It is likely that more than half of the Nuclear Facility’s cost would just address upgrades to this facility because of the bad location.

It’s cleanup time. For real protection of Northern New Mexico, let’s spend the resources to remove the legacy radioactive and hazardous wastes that have been dumped across the Lab property instead of building unneeded facilities that will produce more waste. The removal of the waste, which is perched above our aquifer, will provide real jobs and long-lasting benefits.

A key issues seems to be that the data has to be qualified by a “validation” process before LANL will release it to the public.

Anther concern we have is that although data was collected by NMED from different days it was summed together for the analysis. As we know, the area near the Lab burned just part of that time. Did this summing with different days mask any spikes in contaminants? The way the information is being composited we may never know. LANL had it’s monitors running but we don’t yet have access to that information. It will show up in RACER, but not in time for emergency actions.

We are looking into the records and have corresponded with NMED about their process We will keep after LANL for their data, and will write a detailed post about how all this is playing out.

It all begs the question of how to get information to the public in a timely manner so that choices for safety can be made immediately if needed.. even if it is not formally validated if there are dangerous levels they will show up. As we’ve seen repeatedly, nuclear sites need publicly accessible monitoring that is close to realtime. Developing such monitors should be a national priority for the great resource for science of the labs. For instance, LANL helped develop a laser-based (LIDAR) system for analyzing particulates in the air that is now being used in Mexico City… but not Los Alamos.

My apologies for taking so long to respond to your reply.

Thank you very much for that response. Detail is helpful to me. Our newspaper (Buffalo News) gave two days to the fire as an AP wire. It contained only statements from LANL and the data were gross. It was sloppy and gave no quiet to my mind about your situation. It still does not, but I feel like I can explain correctly.

I generally concur with your statement about nuclear technology. However, I do not always believe that knowledge is power. It is how you use it to shape your policies, action and your future when knowledge has its highest value. I wonder sometimes how, in a nation that so easily declares war on everything from poverty to drugs to other nations that such an ethos cannot be applied to ongoing ecological disasters, or perfectly foreseeable ones.

Salut,
MaryAnne Coyle

http://www.lamonitor.com/content/mda-t-cleanup-costs-could-top-1-billion

To bad you can only read the first few lines.

Richard Norton
Santa Fe, NM