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How to clean up Los Alamos
Preliminary Comments
September 8, 2004 draft, noon
By Greg Mello
Introduction
The environmental situation with respect
to pollution from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is complex. The regulatory situation is far more complex
– so complex, I doubt if anyone fully understands all the possibilities,
contingencies, and nuances. The
nation’s primary hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA), together with the state’s “baby RCRA,” the New
Mexico Hazardous Waste Act (HWA), which together are the active core
of the regulatory authority at the site, were simply not designed
to cope with this situation and cannot effectively do so. This is all the more true in the absence of genuine, active
democratic participation, which the New Mexico Environment Department
(NMED), the Department of Energy (DOE) and its quasi-independent nuclear
weapons fiefdom, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA),
and finally the University of California (UC), which manages the site
for the DOE and NNSA, all have potent reasons to discourage.
Still more complex, primarily because it is kept
so cryptic, is the enormous tension that lies beneath the surface
gloss of politics and public-relations – the tension between the world
of nuclear weapons and the world of human beings and the values which
have built their culture, civilization, and the body of laws by which
they are maintained.
The world of nuclear weapons is a world of absolutes. It is a world of enormous temperatures and pressures, physical
conditions which have already been used to create enormous death and
destruction. Such violence
seduces the leaders of the nation-state to think that nuclear weapons
can be for them – but not for others – the old Roman ultima
ratio, the final arbiter of conflict, the final and unfailing
source of absolute national power and sovereignty. The details of such a weapon thus require absolute secrecy,
which in turn requires absolute obedience, which is absolutely incompatible
with democracy and freedom.
Morally, these weapons turn the world upside down. The nuclear weapons enterprise, basically, is a quest to achieve
the most extreme opposite of the Golden Rule that science can devise
– maximal yet convenient death to any and all others, with as much
safety and security for myself as possible. As such, it corrodes the moral basis of civilization directly,
leading to nihilism, despair, and, as such an intense conflict between
normative systems ramifies through our government, legal collapse,
as we see now in the case of environmental regulation at LANL.
Nuclear deterrence is, after all, little more than
a doctrine of state-sponsored terror, useful for rulers to control
their own populations and any competing political interests in their
own countries at least as much as it is useful in coercive diplomacy
elsewhere, all the while providing no actual defense or security for
the country which asserts such a doctrine.
When the institutions which comprise such a regime
– a regime which is utterly ruthless and death-dealing as a matter
of commitment and ideology, at its very core – confront a small, provincial
bureaucracy in a historically weak state with an unpaid, volunteer
legislature, it is the latter which will give way. And it has. We are grateful the situation is not worse, and for this we
must thank the civil servants at NMED and DOE who toil, often thanklessly,
guided at crucial junctures only by the light of their own consciences.
The remedy to the environmental contamination posed
by nuclear weapons, and the challenge they pose to our state’s ability
to regulate its own affairs, including the protection of its environment,
will not be found in bureaucratic reform, which is fundamentally incapable
of addressing the issues involved. It will be found in a sober recommitment to
the values that make us human at all, a recommitment which necessarily
involves a firm rejection of the will to violence embodied by the
weapons which waste us, our land, and the efforts of our civil servants.
The central idea in the multiple lawsuits filed against
New Mexico by DOE, NNSA, and UC was that nuclear weapons are too important
to be hemmed in by little environmental laws. Neither, then, can we allow our response to the crisis posed
by these weapons to be captured in little, timid ideas. We must disenthrall ourselves, as Mr. Lincoln said some time
ago, if we would save our state, its people, our environment – and
indeed, if we allow our eye to take in a wider picture, humanity itself. As Mr. Lincoln said then, we cannot avoid history. Today, as then, we have to choose where we stand, and for what,
and we have to speak that truth, because it will be the truth about
who we are.
1. Some important basic facts about the environmental situation at Los
Alamo
The first step is to achieve some basic clarity about
the situation. While I am not
fully cognizant of all the currently-available details, these elementary
big-picture facts can and should be stressed.
There is no safe level of contaminants, but there are choices about
societal investments.
The Rio Grande will never be contaminated by Los Alamos above any drinking water standard by groundwater discharge from
LANL watersheds, for fundamental, elementary reasons. The risk resulting from contaminants added to
the Rio Grande from chronic groundwater discharge at LANL will always
be orders of magnitude below the risk from contaminants already in
the Rio Grande and in other New Mexico water supplies (e.g. Albuquerque
ground water).
The Rio Grande could be contaminated above drinking water standards
by some scenarios involving sudden releases caused by, for example,
accident, sabotage, or terrorist act. Another possible scenario is the contamination
of land and river as a result of mining of shallowly-buried wastes
at LANL, e.g. mining done in pursuit of the fissile materials buried
at LANL.
Wells on the east side of the Rio Grande will never become contaminated
above drinking water standards by Los Alamos-caused ground-water pollution.
The regional aquifer at Los Alamos, where it has become contaminated
or where it may be contaminated in the future, can never be cleaned
up by any pumping or injection method. That aquifer is too areally extensive and too thick (these
two together mean that it has too great a volume), and it is too deep. It will always be much cheaper (by orders of
magnitude), to apply cleanup technologies at the wellhead, if ever
needed, than several hundred feet deep in the ground.
There is no danger of massive contamination of the regional aquifer,
because there is no mobile body of contamination adequate to cause
it. There is some contamination
of that aquifer in some places which so far has not risen above any
water quality standard in any public water supply well. It may or may not ever do so.
The simplest, cheapest, and most reliable monitoring wells for contamination
of the regional aquifer as it may affect human health now or in the
future, are the drinking water wells in that aquifer, which can be
monitored closely for trends in contaminants for a tiny fraction of
the cost of an adequate system of deep monitoring wells.
There is no other public purpose for investigation and monitoring
of the aquifers at Los Alamos than to protect public health. Since an adequate monitoring system for aquifer contamination
is already in place (a consequence of the facts above), the only purpose
for any hydrologic investigation at LANL is to inform the active removal of contamination from either the aquifers or the ground
above them. Passive contaminant attenuation in the aquifers, i.e. doing nothing, to the
extent that approach is chosen, is adequately served by monitoring
the existing drinking water wells.
There is already an extensive body of knowledge about the geology
and hydrology of Los Alamos, including about the regional aquifer. As concerns contamination in the regional aquifer, that body
of knowledge is more than adequate for the purposes of decision-making
regarding any and all actions that might be taken to protect human
health.
While the overall hydrogeology is already known in general terms,
it will not be possible, no matter how much money is spent, to produce
a finely-detailed, fully-capable model of LANL hydrology that is capable
of predicting the transport and fate of contaminants from a given
recharge area to a given discharge area to a useful degree of accuracy. Not only is there no need for such a simulacrum,
but there are insurmountable technical problems that prevent its completion. One such problem is the fact that the hydrogeology of Los Alamos
is very heterogeneous, and the flow in fractured basalt in particular
is probably not even always Darcian, i.e. some pathways probably exhibit
the kind of flow that occurs in pipes. Other highly permeable zones also exist and
are elusive. The location of
the highly-permeable features cannot be fully discovered by drilling,
since their dimensions are measured in inches or in other cases in
feet, and the LANL site is 1.2 billion square feet in size. Statistical methods are merely descriptive. It’s far simpler, wiser, and cheaper to remove what contaminants
one can, since it is already known which are the most important ones
to remove, and the overall risk is dominated by potential future events
that take place at the surface anyway, i.e. is not dominated by hydrologic
processes. A second trans-scientific
problem is posed by the hydrologic properties of fractured vadose
zones, for which there is no accomplished theory, let alone predictive
capability. The prompt movement
of meteoric water to depth in fractures apparently depends sensitively
on the surface characteristics of these cracks, among many other factors,
which presumably vary from spot to spot and also with other conditions
(physical, biological, chemical) in some complicated way. The fractured vadose zone problem has defied clear understanding
so far at Yucca Mountain, despite massive federal investment. The upshot of these issues and others is that
at LANL, with this “brute-force” approach, one must destroy the mesas
in order to “save” them – “saving” being defined merely as knowing
about them (or knowing how they used to be prior to drilling all those
holes, in some fictitious, idealized sense), not as remediating them. In addition to these two trans-scientific issues,
objectively unknowable factors such as climate change also weigh in. Much could be said about the “institutional autism” that characterizes
the current bureaucratic approach to the objective world and its other
logical, not to mention institutional and political, weaknesses, but
these two scientific issues must suffice to provide a glimpse of deeper
and more extensive problems.
It is conceivable that some of the perched intermediate aquifers at
Los Alamos could be remediated if this was found to be desirable. This is because the concentration of contaminants in those
aquifers is much greater (heuristically, let’s say 10 times greater)
than in the deeper aquifer, while the volume is much less (heuristically,
let’s say 10 times less); the depth is also less. This means that if active protection of the regional aquifer is desired (as opposed to
passively monitoring), it is much more cost-effective (heuristically,
perhaps 100 times more cost-effective, given the two factors mentioned)
to focus efforts on the intermediate aquifers, as opposed to the regional
aquifer.
But the shallow alluvial aquifers and the vadose zones above them
are in turn contaminated, in some places, to a much greater degree
than the associated intermediate aquifers. They are also much more accessible, with drilling
costs a factor of, heuristically, 10, 100, or perhaps even 1,000 times
less than that for the intermediate aquifer, depending on the type
of well emplaced. This means
that for the purpose of removing contaminants, as well as for the
subservient purpose of investigating contaminants and their associated
geohydrology, it is much more cost-effective to focus on these shallow
aquifers, vadose zones, and associated materials (some of which are
accessible to a variety of removal and treatment technologies) than
it is to focus on deeper aquifers. Contaminant removal (and hence investigation,
the sole purpose of which should be active remediation, given the
above facts) will be, heuristically, perhaps 100 times more cost-effective
than in the intermediate aquifers, and hence perhaps 10,000 times
more cost effective than in the regional aquifer.
Generally speaking, by far the greatest mass of contaminants at Los
Alamos lies in the Material Disposal Areas (MDAs), which are all fully
accessible at the surface, for better and for worse, with technology
as simple as a shovel powered by human beings.
All the contaminants in those MDAs, as well as all the contaminants
at the site in general, will eventually be somewhere else. What is not known is the shape of the loss curves for each
contaminant from each dump site. These can never be known to any important degree
of precision.
In the long run, the risk and total hazard associated with Los Alamos
contamination will be dominated by the contaminants now in the MDAs,
and in a very few other known, major contamination sites.
Some of those contaminants represent proliferation concerns in the
quantities present. Many nuclear weapons could be made from wastes
now “permanently” buried at LANL in shallow pits, shafts, and collapsed
explosive chambers. In some
cases, these wastes are quite concentrated in fissile isotopes such
as plutonium-239.
It is not possible to construct an objective, scientific risk assessment
for these MDAs and major sites, because some of the most important
risk factors cannot be estimated. These involve human will, intention, institutions,
and memory, all of which change subject to biological, social, political,
epidemiological, climatic, and other events which cannot be predicted
with any confidence at all on a scale of decades, let alone centuries
or millennia. Human beings
are inherently creative and unpredictable; that is what makes them
human. Also, while there is disposal information available
for the MDAs and other few major sites, the accuracy and completeness
of this information is not known. LANL does not know and cannot know what is in those pits and
shafts without physical and chemical inspection.
Investigations that aim to discover movement of wastes from MDA cells
into the immediate surrounding vadose zone may be interesting, but
they have little or no bearing on estimating long-term risk or hazard
from those cells.
Finally, and in many ways most importantly, the total amount of waste
disposed into the environment at Los Alamos is increasing daily at
a significant rate. There is
at present no plan to halt disposal, but rather there is every intention
to continue disposal at Los Alamos indefinitely, at rates which may
approximate past disposal rates. and in unlined pits and transient
containers (e.g. carbon-steel drums) no different from those used
in the past. Disposal of waste increases the long-term hazard
proportionately, all other factors being more or less equal.
2. Clarify terms
– clean up the language
At the outset, it is important to clean up our language,
since public relations practices at LANL and NMED have intentionally
blurred it in order to avoid responsibility and hide what is going
on, perhaps even from themselves. That is how rule by administration works.
Cleanup is not a bureaucratic program by that name. Here, let’s refer to cleanup as real, positive actions taken to remove contaminants from the environment,
in contrast to investigation (physical and chemical measurements to gain data to define the extent
and nature of contaminants in the environment), monitoring (chemical sampling of contaminants already known to be in the environment),
and analysis (manipulation
and assessment of data to assist in decisionmaking).
Cleanup is not the same as leaving a body of contaminants
in the ground or groundwater; neither does it include adding freshly-produced
contaminants to the ground, i.e. pollution. Over the course of the past decade, as in the
decades before that, LANL has done more polluting than cleaning up.
Cleanup may or may not be warranted in any given
case, depending upon political decisions including, among other factors,
considerations of projected medical risk to individuals and aggregate hazard to human and non-human populations
as well as religious, economic, and aesthetic criteria.
Risk, hazard and other political considerations apply
differently at different times, but must be considered together now
and for the foreseeable future, whether or not they are commensurable
or even compatible. They must
be considered in a cross-cultural and multi-generational context. Reconciling values and interests is an inherently political problem, requiring an evolving political solution. Thus considerations of relative political power,
representation (e.g. of other generations as well as the current one),
enfranchisement, accountability, etc. are central to the pollution
problem and decisions surrounding it. Science, among other paths of knowledge, can inform us. People acting together, i.e. politics, will decide.
Broadly speaking, there are really only two alternatives
to cleanup: passive attenuation (thoughtfully waiting,
while monitoring, for the combined processes to dilution, adsorption,
natural chemical and biological destruction, and radioactive decay
to lower contaminant concentrations or total quantities, or both);
and prompt or eventual abandonment
in place, usually after attempting to retard the movement of contaminants
within the environment by means of barriers such as landfill caps,
passive groundwater barriers, and other geotechnical engineering projects. There are obviously degrees of care and sub-alternatives
in all these categories.
Waste is not stored in landfill cells, as there are no means to inspect it and no means
or intent to take it anywhere else. Discarded waste materials not being stored have been disposed and are already in the environment. Such waste can and will migrate, but cannot “migrate into”
the environment because it is already there.
What ultimately happens to contaminants that are
“cleaned up?” They may be treated and destroyed or at least rendered less inherently dangerous;
and/or they may be disposed in the environment again, presumably in a place and in a manner that
has a lower hazard now or in the future and/or meets other political
objectives. Contaminants removed from the environment are
present in a matrix of earth materials (soil, rock) or water, which
may sometimes be partially removed from the contaminants to facilitate
treatment, transport, and subsequent disposal of the latter. Cleanup may thus involve removing contaminants
in earth or water in one place and disposing of them in another, with
or without treatment or subsequent packaging, etc., even in another
location at the same site, if the new location is much less hazardous
or meets other important political objectives.
3.
Cleanup involves political and cultural, as well as environmental,
decisions
Cleanup involves risks to individuals,
both to workers and to populations, as do all other human activities. Construction of homes, all industrial and laboratory work,
military service, childbearing, even white-collar employment with
accompanying stress, as well as recreational activities – not to mention
dietary and life-style choices – all involve risk. Individuals and collectivities assume these often-considerable
risks voluntarily for the sake of other goals and values deemed more
important, or perhaps they do so as a result of coercion, compulsion,
or vice. The first situation
we call “freedom.”
If risk reduction were the sole or even the primary
goal of life, there would no human life at all, and in particular
there would be no economic life.
Thus cleanup decisions, like all other decisions,
are never made solely on the basis of net risk reduction or a balancing
of risks, but always involve other political values and goals.
Risk, whether from contamination, from cleanup activities,
from hostile attack or from the measures we take collectively in the
name of “defense” or “national security,” needs to be viewed in proportion
to other risks, and especially in relation to the sum of all risks. The risk of death
for each individual is unity – a complete certainty. As far as death is concerned (the usual central concern of
“risk assessment”), all decisions in any sphere, including decisions
about cleanup, national security, etc. can only change the time, place
and manner of our death, not its probability.
Translating, then, cleanup decisions into a context
in which we focus on life, rather than one concerned with death and
motivated by the fear of death, we can say that cleanup decisions
are embraced not just in order to allow people live longer, but also
in order to change the content or experience of life, as well as its
meaning. Cleanup involves the living landscape, a tapestry woven
of both fully human and fully non-human elements, involving our history
as well as our hopes. Cleanup,
or failure to clean up, change us as well as the land. Drifting forward through the decades, as we have been doing,
is also a kind of decision, and will change us as well.
Cleanup decisions, like other important personal
and public decisions, change our relationships to past and future
generations. Such decisions
are in this sense fully historic and cultural as
well as environmental.
I’d like to say more, and say it more rigorously
and fully, but can’t, not today. So skipping past more rigorous and better-reasoned
preliminaries than appear here, I want to say that struggles over
cleanup at LANL involve, among other things, a hidden cultural struggle
over the meaning of nuclear weapons and nuclear careers (past, present,
and future), and over the pollution that results from both. Especially: does that pollution truly exist, requiring action and investment
on our part, or does it not exist – that is, is it trivial and forgettable? This is not an objective problem, but involves a political
process based on value choices in which there are very clear material
winners and losers. That is
why so much money is being spent by DOE and NNSA to fight cleanup. What is at stake is quite momentous, for them as well as for
us.
The political function of the extensive “scientific
investigation” process outlined in the NMED Order, should it stand,
is to provide a way to postpone and to hide that political process
behind a veneer of pseudo-scientific obfuscation and hence respectability,
given our largely scientifically-illiterate society, while completely
disenfranchising citizens. That
is the political function of risk assessment generally, and why risk
assessment studies, as well as the ideology that lies behind it, is
so lavishly funded by corporate and national security interests around
the world.
4.
End the financial dependence of NMED on DOE
There are basically only two good ways
to fund the regulators and more than make up for DOE’s conflict-of-interest-generating
payola. One is for the legislature
to appropriate the money. Probably
this would occur as part of a general awakening as to the value of
government in general – a reverse of the hostility to government we
now see, which hurts New Mexico even more than it does most other
states.
The second is to charge a fee for regulatory activities
directly to the regulated parties. This fee must apply to all who are regulated in order to be
equitable and to avoid constitutional challenge under equal-protection
principles. The simplest and
fairest way to administer it is probably by the hour, the normal way
of doing business in the world. Facilities
will have just one more incentive to obey the law.
As the situation stands today, enforcement is extremely
expensive for NMED, prohibitively so in most cases, especially where
facilities with large resources challenge NMED’s authority. This breaks down the regulatory structure, quite apart from
DOE and its virtually unlimited resources. NMED needs a proportional, structural incentive to comply with
its regulations.
This arrangement would also lead to both greater
economic efficiency and equity, as non-compliers would pay the marginal
cost of noncompliance, and that cost would not be shifted to the tax-paying
public as an externality.
5. Publish
what is already “known;” do modest, appropriate analysis
Publish everything that is known – everything – from all previous
studies at Los Alamos in a management- and citizen- friendly format
on the web, including all unclassified data, and make everything available
in active GIS files. No one,
and certainly not NMED, has access to the pertinent data now, even
though in theory it is all available at LANL. This is a major project, and will involve the creation of meaning
and memory through organizing what is “known.” In fact, it is known because it is not known by anybody, and cannot be used by anybody,
not even LANL. The redaction of mountains of data into specific
cultural meaning is a political process. That is why the files must be active, manipulable
files. It is entirely inappropriate
for the data to lie with the polluter and be doled out in patronizing
manner to the genuine, legitimate authorities.
For that matter, all unclassified data at LANL, of all kinds, should
be available to all. Hiding
public information in a democracy is like sticking one’s head in the
sand. It fosters not just blindness
with respect to specific decisions, but also what might be called
a culture of “institutional autism,” and it does nothing for security. Activities which might have catastrophic consequences to the
host society if revealed should not be done at all.
For contamination already in underground waters, provide a summary
by mass of each contaminant by aquifer for each surface watershed,
with associated data quality and numerical bounding studies. Use existing data only.
For all contaminated sites, and using existing data only, prepare
a geocoded database with the estimated mass of each contaminant at
each known location, dividing larger contaminated areas into subareas. Tying this database to an active map is a straightforward and
inexpensive process, and may have already been done.
For floodplain areas, use existing data to prepare, for each contaminant
and for each watercourse, a volume/mass curve showing the relationship
between the volume of earth materials in that floodplain and the contaminant
mass which is contained in it. The detailed mapping, led by LANL scientist
Danny Katzman, has only been done for some watersheds. It should be completed for the Mortandad Canyon
watershed, and further investigations in other canyons conducted if
merited by the total amount of contamination present in that canyon. But first use, as said, use the data already
available.
6. Halt land disposal at LANL
Halt land disposal of new nuclear waste at LANL. Any hope of cleanup is largely absent without this step. This should be done because:
LANL’s dissected mesas have no sites
suitable for nuclear waste disposal;
DOE has access to far better disposal sites, both those it owns
(e.g. the Nevada Test Site, with far better environmental conditions)
and those it has under contract (e.g. in Utah, at a site without potable
groundwater);
shipping waste will require careful packaging and certification,
which is not now done, and which will cause “upstream” pressure on
waste generators, in effect internalizing externalities in waste generation
decisions;
off-site disposal will, according to knowledgeable insiders, be
significantly cheaper than disposal at LANL; and most of all;
the programs which generate nuclear waste at LANL have, for the
most part, negative social value in themselves and should be gradually
shut down, greatly decreasing the volume of waste in question. This single step alone will “clean up” – i.e. prevent – approximately
half the pollution at LANL by 2100, relative to options involving
continued disposal.
It will be argued that NMED has no brief to call for a halt to radioactive
waste disposal, let alone radioactive waste generation. This is true, except at areas G, H, and L, over which NMED
holds permitting authority, including closure and post-closure provisions
among others. Halting waste disposal is the official responsibility
of the Governor and Legislature, whose job it is to articulate a consensus
of values which protect New Mexicans and provide for the proper development
of the state’s society and economy, and for the protection of the
state’s environment. Regulation
is not enough. It never has
been; it has always been a partial response to a larger cultural crisis. Regulation draws its strength from ideals chosen
and expressed, and from continued political investment in those values. Without leadership from elected representatives,
leadership expressed in new law and decisive executive action, regulatory
structures turn into formalized fossils, eventually unable to accomplish
even rudimentary versions of the tasks originally set for them. This failure is usually not apparent until it
is revealed by some sudden crisis or disaster. Governor Richardson has allowed NMED to waste its time and
talent defending lawsuits that the Governor himself should have condemned
loudly and clearly, and worked hard to vacate. He could have succeeded. In
fact, he should have forestalled them, and it may be the absence of
any response from the Governor to the first lawsuit, filed only by
UC, that emboldened DOE, NNSA, and the Justice Department to file
more lawsuits. Richardson never
even tried. We know this because
all the primary means he had for defeating this challenge to New Mexico
involve media exposure.
6.
Decontaminate and demolish the old buildings
There is no excuse for keeping contaminated buildings in place for
years, even decades, like haunted ghosts. They are dangerous, and they should be removed.
7. [More to come]
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