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Bulletin 283: Interesting new aerial photos of LANL July 23, 2021 Permalink for this bulletin. Please forward! Previously: Bulletin 282: New billboard: "One bomb core: $50 million -- or 1,000 teachers. Choose." Dear friends and colleagues -- We have recently posted some interesting aerial photos of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and vicinity, mostly taken in April and June of this year. We have a couple of hundred more but these will give interested parties some idea of what LANL and its surroundings look like these days. Google Earth is also very helpful, especially for its historical images. All these pictures were taken legally with a long lens and can be used freely with our permission (write Trish). There was some smoke from fires in Arizona on both days so good distant shots weren't possible. Most buildings can be identified via this map-based archive of contaminated areas, dated but still useful. For each technical area, click on "facility maps and hazard locations" to identify some of the main buildings. A few very brief and informal notes might be helpful. 1. As you can see here and here, the once fairly verdant forests surrounding Los Alamos have mostly burned off. Under the present post-Holocene conditions these were relict forests -- a metastable ecosystem which fires pushed over the edge. They will never grow back. See also slides 18-23 here. 2. You can see hundreds of feet of vertical displacement along the Pajarito Fault in this south-facing view along the fault. This is the active western edge of the Rio Grande Rift Valley. See also slides 48-50 here. 3. Many people have never seen a nuclear weapons or nuclear materials convoy. We encountered this one by chance and followed it as we went up to an appointment in Los Alamos, calling ahead to the Los Alamos Monitor so they could get a good picture. Five vehicles are visible here. One truck of guards peeled off to follow us to a store in Pojoaque, then to the Monitor, then to a coffee shop, where we were photographed many times and where the Los Alamos police came to see us per their memorandum of understanding with the feds, laughing. Expect a lot more of these convoys if production ramps up. 4. As noted, there are 5 pictures included on this page that relate to the proposed additional electrical transmission line across a wildland area of the Santa Fe National Forest. Our press release; scoping comments. 5. In TA-3, LANL's most populous technical area, this picture shows the decrepit, contaminated Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) Building and the Main Shops, both built in the early 1950s. North is to the right. The important Sigma complex is where most non-plutonium parts for pits were historically built. NNSA seeks to replace this earthquake-fragile structure starting in the late 2020s, a so-far off-the-books expense. This picture is one of many that show just how "full" the accessible LANL mesas are. Most building sites are taken and there is an amazing amount of materiel stacked here and there across the lab. 6. Construction is expensive at LANL. The Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility (RLWTF), shown here (with round tank) on the immediate far (north) side of the large Material Disposal Area (MDA) C, has been the object of decades of improvements, costing well in excess of $100 million dollars. (See "Draining the Nuclear Swamp," Roger Snodgrass, May 3, 2019.) The Transuranic Waste Facility (TWF) (here) is another $100+ million project that was not designed correctly and may still not be functioning at full capacity. Who can keep up with all of LANL's dysfunctions? 7. The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), here, with its many beamlines, has managed to re-invent itself many times since DOE tried unsuccessfully to shut it down in the 1990s. LANSCE is the largest regular source of off-site radiation at LANL. To our eyes it also looks full of junk, some no doubt radioactive. 8. Like other places at LANL, much could be said about Area G chemical and nuclear waste site and TA-54 as a whole. On my first visit to TA-54 in 1984, acids, bases, and organic chemicals each had their own unlined shaft down which glass carboys were dropped or their contents poured. Tritiated lithium hydride was reacted with water in open unlined pits. This picture of the "Mirador" development in White Rock with TA-54 in the background illustrates some of the trends shaping Los Alamos today. Housing for new LANL workers, especially for the additional 2,000 people LANL envisions working full-time on pit production and assorted support functions, is desperately needed. The County's consultants believe about 5,000 housing units are needed, which would dramatically increase the size of the community and its sprawl. Hence this "Transuranic Trail" ticky-tacky. In the summer, students and post-docs have been known to camp in the woods or sleep in their cars. Immediately east of the water tank is Tsirege ruin, the largest single Anasazi ruin on the Pajarito Plateau. Wetlands that once supported that Pueblo and which gave rise to a striking Avanyu water serpent pictograph on the cliffs, border nuclear waste disposal today. On the other (north) side of the Area G nuclear waste disposal and storage site, immediately abutting it, lie sacred lands of San Ildefonso Pueblo, in a wedge that penetrates far to the west in this picture. Eyewitnesses, and Pueblo leaders, tell us of an AEC report that urged the intentional contamination of these lands -- very important in Pueblo cosmology and ritual -- in order to seize them. Nuclear waste accident standards as affecting Indians visiting these lands are about 150 times more lax than those affecting the same waste stored in the heart of LANL, at TA-55. 9. We have included several pictures of TA-55, including closeups. This is to be the center of LANL pit production. What you may derive from these pictures, for example this one from the north, is just how crowded this site is. Just-in-time nuclear materials and pit shipping is going to be challenging. The security fence you see cost at least $5,000 per inch in its most recent iteration. Significant new construction requires moving portions of it, twice. This picture of a new parking garage and RLUOB, also shows the steep slope to the south of TA-55, which confines any new construction to a very limited area and raises questions about the lateral stability of heavy buildings on the south side of the site, given the unconsolidated nature of the sediments beneath the welded top layer of tuff (consolidated volcanic ash). In the immortal words of Dr. John Mansfield of the DNFSB, a large building south of PF-4 could "slide right off the mesa" in a design basis earthquake, according to NNSA's geotechnical consultants. This excavation shows where that building -- the proposed CMR Replacement Nuclear Facility -- was supposed to go. It is here that subterranean "modules" were also supposed to go, connected by tunnel to RLUOB on the right and PF-4 on the left side of the picture. Not a lot of room when all the supporting functions -- multiples of the actual working area -- are included. This picture shows the shocking proximity of TA-55 to the Elk Ridge Trailer Park, almost exactly the same distance (~3,100 ft.) as residences lie to the west of Lawrence Livermore's "Superblock" plutonium facility. This picture, taken from the south instead of the north, shows TA-48 in the foreground and the trailer park in the background. By the way, don't think rents are cheap in this trailer park. This is a prime location. 10. Of minor interest these days, that is a nuclear testing instrument rack on the right side of this picture of TA-60. Those trailers are likely filled with contaminated soil, or waiting to be -- a common presence around LANL. That's it for now. More formal fare next time, Best wishes, Greg and Trish |
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