Is the Rio Grande Radioactive?

The Manhattan Project was the codename for the U.S.-led project conducted during World War II to develop the first nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Birthed first as a small research project in 1939, the project research took place at over thirty sites, including the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Now, 60+ years later, what once seemed the ideal locale for storing the weaponry debris – a high, isolated plateau in New Mexico…not so much.  Deadly waste is oozing from the now heavily-fractured mountain burial sites and trickling down to the Rio Grande’s edge toward aquifers, springs and streams which provide drinking water to a quarter million northern New Mexico residents.

Fortunately, contamination levels in the Rio Grande have not elicited public health warnings, although unsafe concentrations of organic compounds such as and various radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission have been detected, according to a November 1 post on latimes.com.

Yet, collected surface contamination can become embedded in sediment, or potentially move into groundwater, posing the greatest long-term danger to drinking-water wells, and, ultimately the Rio Grande itself.

In 2002, the New Mexico Environment Department began an extensive cleanup in and around the Los Alamos area.  Contaminated soil was removed from canyon bottoms; wetlands were planted and small dams were built to retard the flow of polluted storm water. Throughout the summer, the lab began loading some of its hottest radioactive waste into sealed containers by remote control and trucking it to a federal underground storage facility in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Today, Los Alamos scientists claim to be uncertain as to where all of the waste was buried across the laboratory's 40-square-mile property. Additionally, a draft report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last summer said the lab may have substantially underreported the extent of plutonium and tritium released into the environment since the 1940’s.

With a population exceeding 12,000, Los Alamos today is a far different place than it was in 1943 when the secret weapons complex was known as "Site Y."

The Los Alamos lab now engages in climate-change research, as well as evaluating new tests for breast cancer and analyzing biological pathogens, although most of its budget remains earmarked for national defense. Los Alamos is the nation's sole manufacturer of plutonium pits (the “triggers” for nuclear weapons), and it continues to produce toxic waste.