RADIOACTIVE LEGACY
Study suggests hazards around nuclear arms sites are worse than believed
LOS ANGELES — At the dawn of the nuclear age, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration placed the nation’s major nuclear weapons production and research facilities in large, isolated reservations to shield them from foreign spies — and to protect the American public from the still unknown risks of radioactivity.
By the late 1980s, near the end of the Cold War, federal lands in South Carolina, Tennessee, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio and Washington state, among other places, were so polluted with radionuclides that the land was deemed permanently unsuitable for human habitation.
That much has long been accepted as a price for the nation’s nuclear deterrent. But a far more complex problem could emerge if recent research is correct.
Studies by a Massachusetts scientist say that invisible radioactive particles of plutonium, thorium and uranium are showing up in household dust, automotive air cleaners and along hiking trails outside the factories and laboratories that for half a century contributed to the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The findings provide troubling new evidence that the federal government is losing control of at least some of the radioactive byproducts of the country’s weapons program.
Marco Kaltofen, a nuclear forensics expert and a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said he collected samples from communities outside three lab sites across the nation and found a wide variation of particle sizes. He said they could deliver lifelong doses that exceed allowable federal standards if inhaled.
“If you inhale two particles, you will exceed your lifetime dose under occupational standards, and there is a low probability of detecting it,” he said.
A peer-reviewed study by Kaltofen was published in its final form in May in Environmental Engineering Science.
Kaltofen, who also is the principal investigator at the nuclear and chemical forensics consulting firm Boston Chemical Data Corp., released a second study in recent weeks.
The Energy Department has long insisted that small particles like those collected by Kaltofen deliver minute doses of radioactivity, well below typical public exposures.
One of the nation’s leading experts on radioactivity doses, Bruce Napier, who works in the Energy Department’s lab system, said the doses cited by Kaltofen would not pose a threat to public
health.
Such assurances have been rejected by nuclear plant workers, their unions and activists who monitor environmental issues at nearly every lab and nuclear weapons site in the nation.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, cited a long history of denial about the claims of “down winders,” the residents of Western states who were exposed to radioactive fallout from atmospheric weapons testing.
“We cannot trust selfreporting by the Department of Energy,” he said. “I don’t accept that low levels of radioactivity have no risk.”
Tom Carpenter, executive director of another watchdog group, the Hanford Challenge in central Washington, said as recently as last year that the Energy Department released an unknown quantity of radioactive particles during demolition of a shuttered weapons factory, the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
Kaltofen said a broader independent study should look at residual contamination around Hanford. An Energy Department spokesman at the Hanford site said the office had no comment on the studies.
For his studies, Kaltofen collected samples outside the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the former Rocky Flats weapons plant near Denver and the Hanford site.
The samples were collected from the crawl spaces of homes, a trailer park office, vacuum cleaner bags, automotive air filters, furnace filters and along a hiking trail.
He subjected those samples to electronic microscopy analysis to determine exactly what type of element was emitting radiation. He identified isotopes of cesium, thorium, uranium and plutonium, all the results of building nuclear weapons parts.
The communities surrounding these facilities have long adapted to the reality that they are near radioactivity, though they are not willing to take risks that compromise their health. Kaltofen’s sampling found some very high levels of contamination in Los Alamos’ Acid Canyon, a recreational area near a community pool and skate park.
The canyon was used during the Manhattan Project and for years later to dump nitric acid wastes from plutonium processing, sending toxic and radioactive effluent down the steep ravine.
The Energy Department conducted a cleanup in 2001, aiming to reduce radioactivity levels to the standard of “as low as reasonably achievable.” The lab takes the position that the cleanup lowered doses to recreational users well below federal guidelines.
“I trust the cleanup, but
I am aware that it would be impossible to clean it up entirely,” said Jody Benson, a Los Alamos resident and chair of the local Sierra Club chapter, who hikes in the canyon almost every day. “Because I grew up here,
I am a bit cavalier about radioactivity, but that doesn’t mean I am not concerned. I’d support further research.”