LANL Warning About Radioactive Trees

coryboehne writes "KOB-TV in Albuquerque is reporting that Los Alamos National Labs is warning personnel who are cutting trees in a canyon east of Los Alamos that some trees in the area might be radioactive. The canyon, known as Bayo Canyon, was formerly known as Technical Area 10, and was used for weapons testing from the 1940s until 1961. A full summary of Environmental Direct Penetrating Radation in the Los Alamos area is available from the LANL Meteorology & Air Quality Group"

Comments

Trees probably aren't risky, but other areas are

[Ben Escoto]

From the article:

Lab spokesman James Rickman says small sections at the bottom of the canyon, formerly known as Technical Area 10, were used from the 1940s until 1961 as test sites by scientists studying explosions.

Rickman says it's not really that there's a risk, but the lab wanted to point that out.

So apparently that area is not particularly dangerous. However, the LANL reports found some areas with a quarterly doses of about 300mrem. At that rate it wouldn't take long to accumulate a total dose of multiple rems, which starts getting dangerous (5 rem is some legal cutoff I believe). Hopefully those areas aren't inhabited..

Heh

[GigsVT]

The last couple weeks I have been knee deep in research about nuclear testing working on my web site (Buy a nuclear testing shirt! My kid's gotta eat!)

The only test I can think of offhand that was in New Mexico was the original Trinity bomb that was set off pre-Hiroshima.

There were, however, several criticality accidents at Los Alamos, and several "downwind incidents" in Nevada around the same time.

See the "history" page on my site for a description of the Army SL-1 that went critical in Idaho in the 60s. That's one I didn't learn about until recently, and apparently it was a pretty hot one too. The more I research into this, the more amazed I am about the amount of contamination there is scattered around the US, and on the islands we ran tests on.

Not really... the dose levels are still really low

[Jack_Frost]

You're still talking about a few hundred millirem per year... only about twice what you'd receive from the sun at the same elevation. You need about 50 REM in the space of a few hours to alter blood cells. Inhaling the smoke would lead to slightly higher dose rates, but in that case the smoke will kill you long before the exposure does anything to the living tissue.

Re:Forest Fire?

[Meowing]

Most of the radioactive material used had a very short half life, but there are traces of the nasty stuff. A more complete version of the story is here.

Chernobyl, polyploidy

[tcyun]

I recall hearing many years ago about changes in the trees (maples and birches, I believe) near Chernobyl after the accident there. If memory serves, the trees underwent some abberant type of polyploidy resulting in their leaves increasing in size up to 300%. The result were trees with enormous leaves.

A quick google search of chernobyl polyploidy tree brings up a handful of good bibliographic links. I am not a biologist (nor do I have access to all of the references). I do suspect that there is a great deal of additional related information on the effects of the continued radiation on the environment.

Re:Chernobyl, polyploidy

[mesocyclone]

Probably the most interesting outcome of the Chernobyl "experiment" is the almost indetectable effect the radiation had on the environment. All sorts of sensitive monitoring has been done, and there has been no evidence (other than one retracted paper) of damage to animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. In fact, the area has become something of a nature park, since people have been kept out.

The effects of long term exposure to low to moderate levels of radiation seem to be far less than receiving that same dosage all at once. In spite of that, the standards for radiation exposure tend to treat it as lifetime cumulative.

None of this, of course, will keep people from totally freaking every time they hear the word radiation. After all, the medical profession had to change the name for their imaging machines from "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging" to "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" because folks were scared of the word "nuclear!"

Re:Chernobyl, polyploidy

[mesocyclone]

Actually, there have been approximately 2 thyroid cancer deaths and about 1000 excess thyroid cancers as a result of Chernobyl. These were in children who were exposed to high doses of radioactive iodine and were not given iodine supplements to crowd out the radioactive iodine. The thryoid, especially in children, is very sensitive to radioactive iodine. The good news is that thyroid cancer has a very high cure rates, as the above statistics indicate. Other than that, there have been NO adverse effects found in those exposed to the chronic excess radiation from Chernobyl.

There have certainly been assertions of tens of thousands of deaths, but this was right after the event. It has failed to pan out. There were of course a number of deaths within the first month in the people who were exposed to high accute doses - limited to those who had worked on the fire.

As far as longer term effects over a larger area, take a look at your own reference on health effects - it says that only thyroid cancer has been found. Look at http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/c05.html for details.

EXTENSIVE studies have been done.

Animals do NOT show high concentrations of radioactivity in their flesh, although some show *trace* accumulations. Extensive studies of animals in the exclusion zone were done because they had the highest chronic radiation exposures. These tests included sensitive genetic tests looking for enhanced mutation rates. NO POSTIIVE RESULT WAS FOUND (other than the retracted paper). This comes from a recent survey article in Science magazine.

I think what Chernobyl will ultimately show is what many have long suspected: chronic low doses of radiation do *not* produce negative health effects in linear scaling with the known negative health effects of acute high doses. This is totally consistent with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience, although in those cases there was almost no chronic exposure there because there was no localized fallout from those two air burst explosions.

There are no studies that I am aware of that show negative effects on humans from low doses of radiation. There is at least one study that implies positive effects - the rate of lung cancer in the US is *inversely* proportional to the level of household radon (based on per-county death and radon statistics).

For both political and psychological reasons, the hazards of radiation exposure have been vastly overstressed, to the detriment of the public and the environment (due to its impact on nuclear power production). While it is entirely possible that low doses of radiation exposure produce very low increases in cancer incidence, the effect must be so tiny for it to have gone unmeasured.

The excess death estimates used by various agencies are based on linear extrapolations from people who received high acute doses. There is a fundamental rule on radiation exposure which is that the dose is linearly cumulative. There is, however, no evidence to support that rule at low levels.

BTW,,, as the longer term studies come in, there will *undoubtedly* be some statistically significant correlations (.95 probability level), if they test for enough possible consequences. This will happen if there is no effect at all, as the odds of a 1 in 20 significant result are pretty good if you look for more than 10 effects!

Re:Trees probably aren't risky, but other areas ar

[NChaimov]

5 rem is the maximum allowable occupational total effective dose equivalent (10CFR20.1201). Assuming that you don't work in a nuclear plant or other facility licensed to use radioactive materials, then 10CFR20.1301 applies instead:

"... The total effective dose equivalent to individual members of the public from the licensed operation does not exceed 0.1 rem (1 mSv) in a year, exclusive of the dose contributions from background radiation, from any administration the individual has received, from exposure to individuals administered radioactive material and released under 35.75, from voluntary participation in medical research programs, and from the licensee's disposal of radioactive material into sanitary sewerage in accordance with 20.2003. ... The dose in any unrestricted area from external sources, exclusive of the dose contributions from patients administered radioactive material and released in accordance with 35.75, does not exceed 0.002 rem (0.02 millisievert) in any one hour. ..."

These limits don't apply to radioactive trees, of course -- at least not these radioactive trees, since they don't arise from licensed activities.

Do note that dose as low as you postulate is unlikely to have harmful effects, particularly because the dose would be spread out over time. These are the effects from acute doses of radiation of varying intensities:

5-25 rad: No observable effects.
25-75 rad: Chromosomal aberrations and temporary depression of white blood cell levels in some individuals. No externally observable effects.
75-200 rad: Vomiting in 5 to 50% of exposed individuals within a few hours. Fatigue and loss of appetite. Moderate blood changes. Recovery within a few weeks.
200-600 rad: For doses over 300 rem, all exposed individuals will exhibit vomiting within 2 hours and loss of hair after 2 weeks. Severe blood changes with hemorrhage and increased susceptibility to infection, particularly at higher doses. Recovery from 1 to 12 months for individuals at the lower end of the dose range; only 20 percent survive at the upper end of the range.
600-1000 rad: Vomiting within 1 hour, sever blood changes, hemorrhage, infection, and loss of hair. From 80 to 100% of exposed individuals will succumb within 2 months; those who survive will be convalescent over a long period.
from Introduction to Nuclear Engineering, Lamarshe

As you can see, a non-acute dose as low as would be expected from these trees really shouldn't harm anyone.

I just Biked through Bayo Canyon today

[goombah99]

This is so NOT news to the people who live here in los alamos. YAWN. move on, nothing to see here.

any place where there was at some time in its history a possible outflow of radioactive material, the plants will be contaminated. At least its not like hanford where the Tumbleweeds are sometimes radioactive.

But these are all well known. The reason they issued the warning was because the western bark beetle killed something on the order of 80% of the trees in that canyon's mouth in a single season. (No that's not an exageration) . Given the horrific forest fires that burned about 4% of the homes in town, there is a great deal of preventative tree cutting going on. far more than in any other rear with lots of new loggers. An they are cutting trees in areas they traditionally would not have access too. Hence the public warning.

now give it a rest. Hey want to know the good bit about radioactive contamination? you know exactly where it is and how to find it. Unlike for example, chemical contamination. The main thing that is different about los alamos and say your neighbor hood is that we actually know where the contamination is. PLus when we do have a spill it gets cleaned up. I recall a photo in the news of two guys in moon suits cleaning up a chemical spill of ethylene glycol in a parking lot (bottle dropped from fork lift). Front page news. Mean while that same day probably 500 people in chicago city flushed their car radiotors and dump a few thousand gallons of ethylene glycol into the river.

new stories like this suck

LANL is actually really good about this stuff...

[signe]

I used to work at LANL for a short period of time, back in TA 35 (at the time, working on the SSC detectors). They're somewhat strict about their rules on radiation, and who can go in what areas. The building I was working in was T-shaped, and one of the top pieces of the T (the opposite one from my office) fell within the specified distance from an old tritium dump site. It was well posted that NOONE was to be in that wing without the proper training and badging. When my work required that I go down into that wing for a bit, I had to go to a different radiation safety class and get new radiation badges so that they could measure exposure. And that part of the building was only barely hot.

Having family that lived in Los Alamos for many years, and an uncle who worked at the labs as well, LANL was always very good about keeping people apprised of any possible issues. Los Alamos started off as a company town, and it still very much operates that way. If you don't work at the labs, you work for a business that supports the people who work for the labs. Everyone knows plenty of people who work there, and the town and the labs are very much dependant on each other.

-Todd

'Going Critical' is not bad

[NChaimov]

See the "history" page on my site for a description of the Army SL-1 that went critical in Idaho in the 60s. That's one I didn't learn about until recently, and apparently it was a pretty hot one too.

There is a common belief that 'going critical' is synonymous with a meltdown, or out-of-control chain reaction or manifold other bad things. This is, however, false.

A nuclear reactor is a device which creates chain reactions to amplify the effects of neutrons. The neutron multiplication factor describes whether the number of neutrons present in the core is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. Based upon this, the following are defined:

Subcritical: there are fewer neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is less than one.
Critical: there are exactly the same number of neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is equal to one.
Supercritical: there are more neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation as a result of delayed neutrons only, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is greater than one.
Prompt Critical: there are more neutrons in the current neutron generation than in the previous neutron generation as a result of prompt neutrons alone, e.g. the neutron multiplication factor is equal to one plus the reciprocal of 1-beta, where beta is the fraction of neutrons which are delayed.

Therefore: 1) A reactor must be critical to maintain its power. 2) A reactor must be supercritical to increase in power. Criticality and supercriticality are normal states for a reactor. It's prompt criticality which is bad.

Worry About Old Buildings Instead

[Peahippo]

Welcome to the future; America's past nuclear development can and will haunt us further. Look at the old USSR for an example of the failures of a large nuclear regime. Submarine reactor cores were ejected into rivers! Full liquid waste canisters were dumped in fields! If the Soviet regime hadn't fallen, the public would've likely remained ignorant of the contamination level that existed.

Who cares about trees? The buildings worry me. In the USA, we do know that there are many buildings that are probably contaminated and are sitting in company and government inventories, and are also in an abandoned state. Like all those factories rusting away in the Midwest, the true costs of owning them won't become apparent until the cleanup must occur. And this doesn't encompass the full scope of the problem on military sites. Try finding out about their hazardous waste problems. What we the public do know is a result of conscience, luck, closings and re-use. Sometimes a military man gets a conscience; a reporter gets lucky; or a site is torn up and exposed during closure or transfer of ownership. Then we can get a glimpse at what it Really Going On there.

And people worry about Yucca Mountain. We've tiny Yuccas -- Yuccatesimals? Microyuccas? -- in too many locations to allow Yucca to become a preponderance of worry for us.

Re:Radioactive furniture

[RobKow]

It happened!

Nearly 13 years ago, a cancer-therapy machine was removed from the Medical Center for Specialities in Ciudad Ju rez and taken to a Ju rez junkyard that later sold the machine along with other scrap metal to two steel foundries for recycling. The machine contained 6,000 tiny pellets of radioactive Cobalt-60, which contaminated thousands of steel rebars (used to reinforce concrete) and furniture parts.

Re:Coal plants emit airborne radioactivity

[helix400]

Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants.

That made sense. Nuke plants are virtually pollution free (aside from carefully controlled solid radioactive waste). Closing down nuke plants won't affect acid rain, deforestation, or resperatory illness in any of those ways.

To have your post make sense, switch it around so it says "Do you like those problems? No? Then close down coal plants. Then you'll either have to switch to nuclear, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living"

--
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos

Re:Forest Fire?

[Meowing]

Who eats trees?

Check your food and medicine labels for cellulose. Most of it comes from wood pulp.

Re:Gives me an opertunity to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

(Some infotainment cribbed from the HEW Archive.)

How long after Aug 6 1945 was Hiroshima safe from a radiation standpoint?

Probably within the short term (a few years, maybe a decade at most.)

How long until areas that had LOTS of bombs dropped on them be safe?

Depends on the size of the bombs and a lot of other factors. It'd be the time until the largest dose of fallout decayed to background.

Also, what does one do if a nuke goes off anywhere near them, other then kiss their ass goodbye? What can you do to avoid radiation poison? I always thought the key was to stay away from metal since that becomes contaminated quickly, but hell if I know.

Assume that the bomb in question is 20 Mt. The HEW archive states that a good rule of thumb is to take anyone within the 5 psi overpressure contour (the overpressure contour being, roughly, the extent of the shock wave) as a fatality. This contour is roughly (20000^0.33 * 0.71) = 18.64 km in radius. Out to ~40km, one can expect to receive 3rd-degree burns from the explosion. Within ~4km, you'll receive a 1000-rem dose of radiation (almost always fatal.)

Radiation is the least of your worries with high-yield bombs.

To ruin it for you, when the nuke goes off and it shows this big shockwave, I figured anything that gets hit by that is going to be contaminated. In my head this means you are going to get cancer sometime soon.

See above.

Also, slightly related, can someone explain the EMP to me?

Nuke goes boom, emits a bunch of gamma rays. Gamma rays knock electrons out of the air; those electrons keep knocking other electrons out, until you get ~30K of them for every gamma photon. The gamma rays emitted downward, however, don't knock away as many electrons, so you get a large electric current flowing upward, which bleeds off horizontally in broadband electromagnetic energy (think lightning.) Big masses of electrons moving around willy-nilly cause a large magnetic field to form in the earth and emit more EM radiation. The 100-gigawatt pulse travels out a long way (5 miles for a 1 Mt nuke), inducing a high current in sensitive circuitry, and causing lots of stuff (ICs, for one) to fry.

Re:Gives me an opertunity to ask...

[Richard_at_work]

I cant answer your first questions but as for your latter questions:

Blame the movie Sum of all Fears for this curiosity. To ruin it for you, when the nuke goes off and it shows this big shockwave, I figured anything that gets hit by that is going to be contaminated. In my head this means you are going to get cancer sometime soon.

No, the shockwave is jsut a normal shockwave, nothing special about it. The radioactive fallout is more caused by dust and other particles being sucked into the core of the explosion after this shockwave has passed.

Also, slightly related, can someone explain the EMP to me? I thought Sum of all Fears really fucked that one up but some people have said the EMP is really weak and doesnt travel very far. In another movie, Broken Arrow, the EMP goes out for Miles and Miles. In True Lies, they land the planes and shit before the nuke goes off for which I assume was to avoid an EMP related crash.

Sum of All Fears actually got it more right than any other film. EMPs do not occur for ground detonations at all, they are an effect of detonating a nuclear device high in the atmosphere (ionosphere springs to mind, but im not certain). Broken Arrow got it totally wrong, there would have been no EMP from a underground explosion. Again, in True Lies, either they got it wrong, or they were landing the planes because of the shockwave.

Hope that helps.

As a native New Mexican

[Anonymous Coward]

all i can say is "Who cares?". the local news here is always desperate for a story. if it rains it's a story. if it snows it's a story. if a traffic light is down it's the lead story. you might say it's not the most exciting state in the union.

a longtime friend (14 years) who recently completed his masters in nuclear engineering has taken many opportunities over the years to enlighten me about the joys of nuclear power. he has worked on projects at los alamos and sandia labs and although not technically a rocket scientist he did help design a nuclear powered rocket engine. i've found the easiest way to push his buttons is to scream "no nukes!!!" because he is perhaps a little too sensitive to the the negative stigma most people attach to nuclear energy. my neighbor worked on the manhattan project and when he and my friend get together it's obvious that the nuclear programs in place today are vastly improved over guidelines in place back then. in fact my neighbor has mentioned that if his team had the same guidelines in place back then that there wouldn't have been any atomic bombs at all. my personal opinion is that there are many many threats will all face each day that are probably more dangerous than some trees in a canyon in los alamos will ever be.

the fact that the trees even made the news is just further proof that we have a lot of time on our hands here. when my friend was attending unm a story broke out about "contaminated radioactive waste" that was "piled up" near a storage shed in los alamos. in reality it was a pool (by design) of slightly radioactive water, probably used for cooling... basically you could drink a glass and go on with your life. apparently a lot of concerned people in santa fe were worried their children would soon be coming home from school with three toes and extra appendages soon unless the toxic dump was "fixed". so now it's all over the local news. my friend's professor took the class on a field trip armed with geiger counters to take some readings. they measured near the "toxic waste dump of child killing doom!", they measured various other points in and around los alamos, then they took a few readings around the plaza in santa fe where they had stopped for lunch. it turns out the hottest thing they found all day was a nice big sculpture smack in the middle of the plaza. (plaza being the town center and located such that most residents would be around it regularly and tourists virtually guaranteed to eat next to it =)