Plutonium hotspots appear along tribal lands, hiking trails, city streets and the Rio Grande River, a watchdog group finds 

by Alicia Inez Guzmán April 25, 2024

For years, the public had no clear picture of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium footprint. Had the ubiquitous plutonium at LANL infiltrated the soil? The water? Had it migrated outside the boundary of the laboratory itself?

A series of maps published by Nuclear Watch New Mexico are beginning to answer these questions and chart the troubling extent of plutonium on the hill. One map is included below, while an interactive version appears on Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s website. The raw data for both comes from Intellus New Mexico, a publicly accessible clearinghouse of some 16 million environmental monitoring records offered in recent decades by LANL, the New Mexico Environment Department and the Department of Energy.

Approximately 58,100 red dots populate each map at 12,730 locations, marking a constellation of points where plutonium — a radioactive element used in nuclear weapons — was found in the groundwater, surface water or soil. What’s alarming is just how far that contamination extends, from Bandelier National Monument to the east and the Santa Fe National Forest to the north, to San Ildefonso tribal lands in the west and the Rio Grande River and Santa Fe County, to the south.

The points, altogether, tell a story about the porous boundary between LANL and its surrounds. So pervasive is the lab’s footprint that plutonium can be found in both trace and notable amounts along hiking trails, near a nursing home, in parks, along major thoroughfares and in the Rio Grande.

Gauging whether or not the levels of plutonium are a health risk is challenging: Many physicians and advocates say no dose of radiation is safe. But when questions about risk arise, one of the few points of reference is the standard used at Rocky Flats in Colorado, where the maximum allowable amount of plutonium in remediated soil was 50 picocuries per gram. Many sites on the Nuclear Watch map have readings below this amount. Colorado’s construction standard, by contrast, is 0.9 picocuries per gram. 

Nuclear Watch’s driving question, according to Scott Kovac, its operations and research director, concerned a specific pattern of contamination: Had plutonium migrated from LANL dump sites into regional groundwater? The answer, Kovac believes, is yes. 

That conclusion began to form when Nuclear Watch compiled data from between 1992 and 2023 for plutonium contamination below the soil, and plotted each point into the organization’s now-sprawling map. Red dots coalesce at LANL dump sites. They also appear in the finger-like canyons surrounding the Pajarito Plateau, namely in Los Alamos Canyon, “the main contaminant pathway to the Rio Grande,” a Nuclear Watch summary says.

Much of the contamination likely occurred from the 1940s to the 1960s, during the lab’s “Wild West,” in Kovac’s words — a time of little environmental oversight when the surrounding plateaus, canyons and the entire ancestral Pueblo of Tsirege doubled as a dumping ground, laboratory and wasteland.

The map doesn’t make conclusions about what, exactly, caused contamination at any given site. The sites themselves are chosen for sampling based on “legacy LANL operations” — areas where contamination occurred in the past — a Department of Energy spokesperson told Searchlight New Mexico in an email.

A 1999 environmental impact statement and other documents reveal the extent of that contamination and the many places where LANL buried radioactive waste or dumped effluent, including landfills, canyons, drain lines, firing sites and spill locations.
“Plutonium and uranium have been released into canyons…since the Manhattan Project,” according to another 1999 report, this one focused on the lab’s contribution to radioactive contamination in Cochiti Lake. “In Los Alamos Canyon, these contaminants have been carried by flood flows several tens of kilometers” — more than 12 miles — “downstream into the Rio Grande.”

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