LANL dump site has many protections
Posted at: 06/30/2011 11:12 PM
By: Gadi Schwartz, KOB Eyewitness News 4; Charlie Pabst, KOB.com
A few miles where the Las Conchas fire is burning in Los Alamos Canyon, we checked on a nuclear dump site where old radioactive material was buried more than a half century ago.
Many local residents say they trust Los Alamos National Lab and how they are storing nuclear waste, but Technical Area 21 is the place that makes them nervous, because of what happened there during the dawn of the nuclear age.
The sound of air circulators continuously being filtered and the hiss of air quality monitors are reminders the Tech Area is one of the lab's first radioactive waste dumps, and an old plutonium factory.
Fred de Sousa, who works at LANL, said Thursday, "They went in at the birth of the nuclear age, they helped win the Cold War. They went up very quickly, and the reality is that the risk there at Technical Area 21 today is a lot less than it was just two years ago."
The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years cleaning up the low-level radioactive waste, demolishing buildings and digging up things like radiation suits that were buried in the dirt above Los Alamos Canyon.
Metal buildings protect dig sites, and now with the threat of fire, crews have gone in and covered any exposed materials inside.
De Sousa said, "Wherever there was any hazardous waste showing we covered that up with an additional two feet of dirt, so that even if a fire was able to get in there, it would stop at the dirt. Nothing would burn and nothing would be released in the atmosphere."
In addition to dirt, the buildings are set up to spew a firefighting foam.
"If it's higher than 400 degrees on the inside it will automatically trigger the fire suppression inside the buildings," de Sousa said.
Even some lab employees have said they're worried what could happen if fire burns into the area, but LANL employees insist there's no danger.
> Lab experiments halted by fire
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