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

Re:What are they talking about...

[NotAnotherReboot]

Of course, you seem to be ignoring the fact that we now have nuclear power (whether this is a good thing or not is debatable) and also the fact that millions of lives were saved from a conflict in Asia (whether this benefit outweighs the result is also debatable).

Bottom line: it can have terrible consequences, but it can also be construed as being something that has done much more.

Not again.

[milkmandan9]

I've lived in Los Alamos for most of my life.

There are a lot of alarmists in the area that like to point at things like this and jump up and down and make a whole lot of noise. Granted, there is likely some valid scientific proof to this warning (because they probably wouldn't have issued it if there weren't), but that's all that this is. It's just a reminder to the crews that are working in the area to be careful--they're still allowed down there to clean up if they like.

This is a pretty regular thing for the area. The press gets wind of some sort of memo and the whole thing gets blown out of proportion. Things that should really only be semi-major events (like the Wen-Ho Lee case, for example) get turned into media circuses.

I understand the need for caution and scrutiny but seriously, people, let's keep it appropriate.

This memo is just a warning. It may come from a big, bad, government entity with some secret sleazy conspiracy agenda out to poison our kids or drug the masses or keep the real truth from getting out, but it also comes from an organization staffed with many of my good friends--people that I trust to oversee this type of work and set off alarms if something really bad is going on.

I'd recommend traveling to D.C. if you want to read between the lines.

Re:Not again.

[Herkum01]

just remember, for every one "Memo" that gets blown out of proportion, there are at least ten that are being covered up.

Re:Not again.

[kmellis]

" There are a lot of alarmists in the area that like to point at things like this and jump up and down and make a whole lot of noise." - milkmandan9

Well, let's not forget the spate of brain tumors that came to light back around 1994. I don't know how that whole issue resolved, but I do know that it hovered just around being statistically significant, especially as there was a correlation to age and growing up adjacent to a particular canyon. My ex-wife knew one of these people, a young man who died from his tumor.

I'm a native New Mexican expatriated in hostile, relentlessly right-wing Texas (but in the oasis of Austin). I'm not sympathetic even the tiniest bit to the nuclear alarmists in northern New Mexico. CCNA's bullshit just infuriates me more than most things, actually. (When I was there last fall, I heard on their little news show on KUNM a story about low-level contaminated stuff recycled into materials incorporated into consumer items and they provided no scientific context whatsoever. I actually shouted at the radio.) I've known many people that worked at LANL (and Sandia), and I know some that still work there.

Having made it clear that I'm skeptical and hostile to nuclear fear-mongers, I think that there's reason for Los Alamosans to be mildly concerned about their risk. As a casual student of the history of the Manhattan Project, I know that a) the health danger of cumulative, long-term radioactive dosages was grossly underestimated at that time (and the acute danger was somewhat underestimated, too); and b) in the interests of expediance justified by national security concerns, they were notoriously careless about safety during and after the Project. Just take a look at Hanford and Rocky Flats for examples of just how careless the DOE has been. Or take note of what the supposedly ex-Oak Ridge employee writes above.

Also, my sister was a tumor registrar. She was not a registrar of that district, but she was a registrar of another district in a different state that included a DOE nuclear-related facility. It was her observation that there was clearly an unusual rate of cancers clustered around the facility, although it didn't reach the rigorous threshold of confident statistical significance. But it was not discussed, and the community remained unaware of any possible risk.

I also know that in the case of the cluster of brain tumors of ten years ago that the LANL and the DOE were shown to have been at the very least uncooperative and at the most actively dissembling.

I really think that people need to consider the implications of the fact that Los Alamos has a unique history. It was in its entirety a government installation on an urgent mission where civilian safety considerations didn't apply. It was only in the early sixties that it stopped being a "closed" city. LANL and the DOE is in the awkward position of worrying about a civilian apple-pie American population living in a city that was once wholly part of a government nuclear installation. Whether or not they were reasonably or unreasonably cavalier about safety in the past is irrelevant to the fact that, today, many people live alongside areas that were contaminated to a greater or lesser extent.

These trees are probably not of any real concern. But that doesn't mean that there's not some amount of significantly heightened risk in the area, nor that LANL and the DOE aren't always entirely forthcoming.

(Note: upon reviewing what I've written, I'm uncomfortable that I may give the impression that I'm sympathetic to the people that go berserk and totally irrational at the mention of the word "nuclear". I want to make the point that people are, in general, very very bad at risk analysis. Even though I write above that I believe there's some risk in Los Alamos, I want to make it clear that it is very likely that many people do things, thoughtlessly, on a daily basis that put them at considerably higher risk.)

Re:What are they talking about...

[Anonymous Coward]

millions of lives were saved from a conflict in Asia (whether this benefit outweighs the result is also debatable)

The US and allies studied the likely cost in human lives of bringing WWII to an end by invading the Japanese homelands - since the Japanese were obviously not going to surrender. They had some good sources of information, being able to look at actual casualties in taking Okinawa and other places by force. Their conclusions were that many more lives would be lost in a conventional invasion than would be lost due to the bomb. And further, those lives would be those of the enemy, not of US soldiers, which is not irrelevant when you are at war.

So I think if the question is whether dropping the bomb was justified, then it was at that time, horrible though it sounds.

Coal plants emit airborne radioactivity

[goombah99]

Coal plants emit airborne radioactivity. You'd be better off down wind of yucca mountain or a nuke plant than a coal plant.

Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants. Then you'll either have to switch to coal, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living (sorry now 1000 watt Itaniums for you instead you can freeze in the dark.)

Re:What are they talking about...

[packeteer]

And further, those lives would be those of the enemy, not of US soldiers

Unfortunatly i dont agree that we bombed the enemy. Although we didn't bomb US soldiers the civilians who were killed were not enemies of ours. When the war ended the Japanese didn't harbor the same hatred and agression that we did after 9-11 that we do towards Middle Eastern people.

A clear sign of past stupidity

[dethl]

We were REALLY stupid back in the early atomic days...its not a surprise that there are still radioactive tress...hell...LANL still has SH*TLOADS of transuranic waste waiting for shipment to permanent storage facilities (WIPP?).

Re:What are they talking about...

[kmellis]

" The atomic bomb was not especially violent or heinous, except that it killed either instantly - or over a long time period. - danheskett"

Bullshit. The results of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific. Outside of two kilometers, a significant number of people survived the blast itself and died of injuries within minutes, hours, and days. These were horrible deaths. There are numerous accounts of survivors from nearer the blast wandering around trailing their skin behind them, as they had blistered over their entire bodies and their skins sloughed off.

I will not argue that the firestorms in Dresden and other cities were less horrific than the atomic bombings.

I will argue that the targeting and wholesale slaughter of large civilian populations is inexcusable. It is an atrocity. It is a war crime.

I am a casual student of the Manhattan Project and its result. There was a time when I accepted the official justification for the use of those two bombs. I no longer do. One of them, the implosion bomb which was not certain to work, could have been detonated over the sea as a demonstration. Yes, as it happened the Japanese warlords refused to surrender even after the destruction of Hiroshima. That has no relevance whatsoever. Even if doing the right thing wouldn't have worked, we still had the responsibility to do it. We had no way of knowing it wouldn't work. And we knew that the gun-type bomb would work, so we could still have used it on a city. (Not that I think that that is a morally justifiable action, either.)

There is quite a lot of evidence to indicate that, ultimately, the decision to use the bombs was more political than military in nature.

I think that, aside from the firebombing and nuking of civilian populations, the Allies acted nobly during WWII and they rid the world of two rapacious regimes that were arguably deeply evil. I believe in the essential goodness, or at least decency, of my government and of my fellow citizens and I have no desire to be in any sense a self-hating American. In fact, I despise those who have made this the core of their beliefs.

But I also despise the equally unthinking, and jingoistic and narcissistic hypocrisy that takes a self-righteous accusatory stance against the actions of other nations but which is incapable of critically evaluating our own. The US has committed atrocities.

Every day one can go to various web forums and read the outraged views of Americans who say, "How can anyone be so evil, so inhuman, so unfeeling as to kill those thousands of innocent civilians in the World Trade Center?". They believe that there must be something fundamentally wrong with "those people". And then they do things like spit on a vaguely Arabic looking person on the street. The evildoer rarely believes that he is an evildoer and, quite often, he believes that he is an agent of righteousness. In WWII we were, in fact, the "Good Guys". That doesn't mean that we didn't do Very Bad Things. Our refusal to recognize or atone for our nuclear destruction and torture of housewives, shopkeepers, tourists, and schoolchildren is a deep stain on our national moral character.

I am not apologizing for the Japanese. They are, perhaps, no less hypocritical. While they would like us to apologize for the hundreds of thousands killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they have, until recently, refused to even acknowledge the millions of people they killed in China, particularly Nanking.

a greater outrage still

[twitter]

The greatest outrage of all is how poorly the political process is working to clean up what messes there are. While it's all fine and good to talk about cleaning up a paint factory site so that a child could eat a diet of dirt that would kill it by ruining their intestines, you have to realize that the money spent there is money that won't be spent cleaning up your coffee cans. How about the 17 billion dollars you have paid for Yucca mountian? Did we really need to know the numbers of every speciecs of bug on top of that rock?

Spening public money is not easy to do. The greatest threats must be fixed first, but there's a huge difference between public perception of threats and reality. Studies on waste sites have been made and there are priority lists. Then some loud mouth comes along and asks you if you want a glass of water. Uggg, the long chain of reasoning and risk assesment goes out the window.

Do me a favor and help the folks monitoring water quality. When you see an adverse trend then you can smugly say, "I told you so," and propose ways to fix the problem. Alamism hurts everyone.