A small fire has been contained at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is closed. The 1-acre fire was reported in Water Canyon within Lab’s Technical Area 49. The Lab will remain closed on Tuesday as well.
“I have talked to the director of the laboratory. He’s assured me that all of the materials of a hazardous nature or a radioactive nature are all well controlled and are not in danger and not threatened,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman said.
Meanwhile, a wildland fire near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico— a massive research facility that is home to several metric tons of plutonium and numerous other hazardous and volatile materials — had inched to within just over a mile of the southern edge of that facility’s boundary. …. Of greatest concern at Los Alamos is a part of that facility called Technical Area 55(TA-55), which includes Plutonium Facility 4 (PF-4). Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, said a fire at PF-44 would be “a fucking disaster” that could result in large and lethal releases of radiation. He noted, too, that the Los Alamos facility has had problems with its internal fire suppression systems in the past.
But Roark said that those problems, which have been addressed, involved fire threats inside the building, and that they were unrelated to an approaching wildland fire. He also pointed to the Cerro Grande fire of 2000 — a massive New Mexico wildfire that ultimately breached the facility’s boundary, burning some 7,000 acres of laboratory property and damaging several buildings.
Even in that instance, Roark said, critical buildings containing nuclear material remained safe.
At :40 in – Massive fire 10 years ago took 17 days to burn as much as current fire did in just 2 days
At 5:15 in – Senator: We hope we’re in better position to avoid a catastrophic fire… We’ll find out
Watch video here.
We are not so concerned about the hardened facilities at the Lab constructed of concrete and cleared of combustible materials (i.e., trees and brush) around their perimeters. We doubt that there would be any breech to their containment that would let contaminants escape (with one caveat below). But we do have concerns. One is the fact that over 6 decades the Lab has blown up a lot of uranium and depleted uranium in dynamic high explosives experiments in the general area in front of the fire. We don’t know to what extent the shrapnel or debris has been cleaned up and could possibly be aerosolized.
Another concern, given both the velocity and ferocity of the Las Conchas Fire, is whether any Lab facilities loose their power and back up generators failed to work for whatever reason. In that case containment systems could fail with unknown safety implications.
But our biggest concern is whether the fire could reach the fabric buildings (essentially very large tents) at Technical Area-54’s Area G that store some 20,000 barrels of plutonium-contaminated wastes from nuclear weapons research and production. We recommend that the public use satellite-based fire detection data and fire intelligence information published by the US Forest Service to monitor the situation (see related post for instructions on how use it). From that we can “see” that the leading edge of the fire is a little more than three miles from Area G.
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