New Mexico in Focus; 338; Sandia Lab's Mixed Waste Landfill

Major funding for in focus is provided by the McCune Charitable Foundation, enriching the cultural life, health, education, environment and spiritual life of the citizens of New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, the world changed with the explosion of the first atomic bomb. It launched a nuclear age and marked the beginning of a new industry in New Mexico. 50 years later, the state is left with aging Cold War toxic waste landfills that threaten the citizens of New Mexico, who is in danger of contamination. Find out next on In Focus. Hello, and welcome to In Focus. I'm RC Chapa. Albuquerque's role in helping develop nuclear

weapons hasn't come without a price. It is estimated that there are more than 60 contaminated sites that contain radioactive waste on land owned by sendee and national laboratories. Some of these sites will be cleaned up and some won't. One site that won't is the 2.6 acre mixed waste landfill at Sandia, which is on Kirkland Air Force Base. The site, according to a concerned citizens group, contains plutonium, cobalt and depleted uranium, just to name a few. They say the waste has been buried 15 to 20 feet below the ground and online pits and that it should be cleaned up. Sandia, on the other hand, says a site is too hazardous and too expensive to clean up and that it should be covered up and monitored. My guest today represent both sides of this issue. They are Dr. Miles Nelson, co-founder of an advocacy group called Citizens Action

to Clean Up Albuquerque's Nuclear Waste Dump and John Gould, the Environmental Restoration Program Manager for the Department of Energy in Albuquerque. Thank you both for being here today. John, I'm going to start with you. Why does a DOE believe that the mixed waste landfill is safe? Well, really, the safety factor of anything like this is the ability of the material inside a landfill or whatever site it is to get to you. We spent 10 years and five million dollars investigating this site. We don't believe that the material in this landfill has any potential to reach any receptor. One reason is that there's no liquids in it other than some tritium that was in water. It was a reactor, coolant water that was dumped in one of the trenches in 1967. This has caused some low-level tritium contamination of the area. We put bore holes down in the area in 1990 and found that the tritium had reached about 120 feet. A tritium decays with a half life about 12 and a half years. We put another bore hole down in 1995 and found the tritium had gone no farther than had five years earlier. We determined that the tritium is decaying faster than it's spreading,

so we don't think the tritium is any kind of a risk. The rest of the landfill contains no liquids. We also were posing to put a cover over this landfill with two monitoring systems in the cover itself. They'll tell us whether or not any rainwater is percolating through this cover on its way to the landfill itself. We also are going to have a Vedos-Sone monitoring system. This is a monitoring system under the landfill in the soil above the water table that will tell us if anything is escaping from the bottom of the landfill. We also have a groundwater monitoring system around the landfill and we're adding two additional wells at the state's request. We think that even though we don't believe that the landfill poses a problem, if it should, we'll detect this problem and be able to do something about it. Miles, it sounds like they've got it under control? Well, our group disagrees with that. And it's characteristic of the Department of Energy to sort of downplay the risks of these issues. Number one, this nuclear waste dump is already leaking as John has admitted. Any time you want to assess the risk of anything, you have to know what's in it. And the inventory for this landfill is not well known in spite of what San Diego says. I have

14 pages in front of me, which is the entire inventory of this landfill. 30 years this landfill was in use. I don't think this is an adequate inventory, but this is all that we have. Much of the materials containerize and 55 gallon drums. Those drums will corrode and discharge their contents into this rounding soil at some time. And if we're going to clean it up, I think it makes much more sense to clean it up now than before it has a chance to do more damage. Additionally, there's already some evidence that there's leakage of some of the more solid radioisotopes even to the level of the groundwater, plutonium, uranium, air monitoring stations above the landfill have detected plutonium, which is inconsistent with global fallout in spite of the fact that San Diego tells us this global fallout. That's not the case. I'm concerned that the Department of Energy has been cavalier in the past with other landfills at San Diego, which have contaminated the groundwater. Repeatedly they came back to us and said, there's no way you can contaminate the groundwater, but it has. I think their level of confidence is somewhat suspect. I think it's

better to ensure the safety of our children and grandchildren by cleaning it up now than to wait and see what happens next generation or the generation after. Now you have a 30 page list of what to the landfill might contain. This is all unclassified information. Exactly. This is actually 14 pages. This is supposed to represent 30 years of dumping in this landfill. Obviously, that's inconsistent with 30 years of dumping. This is available to anybody. It's available on our website, which is radfreenm.com. You can come take a look at this. This is not classified material. There is a section of the landfill, the classified portion, which is significantly more radioactive, which we don't really know what's in there. None of our group has security clearance. In fact, it's interesting through the Mexico Environment Department, which is supposed to have regulatory oversight for this to make sure that the right thing gets done. They don't even know what's in the classified portion of the mixed waste landfill, but they're being asked to sign off on a plan which says just cover it and not clean it up. I think that's fascinating. John, why do people not know what's in

this classified section of the landfill? Well, we do know what's in the landfill. You know what it is. Yes. Right now we have declassifiers working on the list to see which of those materials we can declassify. One reason why this material is classified even though it's from the 1940s and 50s really early technology, this is the kind of technology a rogue nation could use to build a nuclear weapon. Be very difficult in the building modern nuclear weapon, but one of the older ones they could possibly do. So we want to keep this whatever material here is needs to be classified. I'd like to address a couple of things that Miles said about the groundwater contamination. Okay, well let me ask you one question though about this classified information. You say the people don't know, but what about Miles mentioned the fact that the Mexico Environmental Department doesn't know will they know all the information or all the the materials that are in this site? Everything that can be declassified, yes. Okay, now you can respond to. Well, in regard to the groundwater contamination of from uranium and plutonium, one part of this job is actually an art in our job is to tell good data from bad data. You often get bad data,

especially when you're detecting things that are right at the detection limit of the equipment during the analysis. When we got hits of uranium or plutonium, we went back and resampled. And when we resampled, we split these samples with the state. We found out the uranium numbers that we got were no higher than background in this area. Plutonium, when we resampled, split the samples with the state and send them in two separate laboratories, we didn't find any plutonium, and not has been found sense. We think it was a false positive. In regard to the inventory we have at the landfill, we think we have excellent inventory. There are procedures in place at the time to record everything that went into the landfill. Now it may only fill 14 pages, but much of the stuff that went in there was the same stuff over and over again, decontamination debris from tech airy five mop heads, that kind of thing. And the people that were doing this were required to record what they put in there. Now maybe they may have forgotten one or two things. We don't know for sure, but the procedures were in place for them to do it. They had no reason not to record this because they were just following the accepted practices for all of us at the time.

Miles, do you have different information? I can see you want to say something. Exactly. Several things. Number one, this is a dump. People dispose of items in a dump in a cabbler fashion, whether they work for this department of energy, or whether it's you taking your household materials to the municipal landfill. Sandia has in the past characterized their inventory as incomplete. They were very honest about that until we started to point out. You guys have said it's incomplete. And since that time, they've fact battled and they've begun to say that we have a very good idea of what's in there. They've even gone so far as to say we know everything that's in there. This is clearly not accurate. The other thing I just want to thanks for bringing up a couple of issues, John. He mentioned that declassifiers are working on declassifying non-censitive materials in the classified section of the landfill. That's because our group asked them to do that. We found three different information after request and I've written Bill Richardson at the Department of Energy and they've been very forthcoming about that. So we're looking at that. But that's from our work. The other issue you mentioned is determining good data versus bad data. And it's funny, it's interesting with the Department of

Energy. They have data which shows plutonium all the way to the groundwater. Your uranium's all the way to the groundwater. And when they don't like that data, they discard it. They'll say, well, it's too small to be significant or must be consistent with naturally occurring uranium or that sort of thing. When the data doesn't support that at all. If you're going to measure something and you get a finding, I would know John would know, you know, this is a scientist, then you need to realize that you have data that says something and you do investigate it to find out exactly what that means. But they discard it and say it must not be accurate. John, the plan for DOE is to keep an eye on the dump or monitor it for a number of years. Why have you chosen to go that route? Well, actually before I mentioned that, I'd like to come and I said to Mel, just said, when we do get data that shows contamination, we don't discard that data. That's why we resample and split the samples from the state off and have us enter two separate laboratories. Okay. Could you repeat your question? Yes. How long does the DOE plan to keep an eye on the waste landfill? And definitely as long as it's necessary.

At a cost of $600,000. That's not correct. $600,000 is the yearly cost of all of our long-term monitoring that we're proposing. For the mixed waste landfill, it's about $120,000 a year. And how do you plan on covering it up? I'm sorry. How do you plan on covering it up? What is it going to look like? We're going to engineer and a VAPO transfer rate of cover, based on native materials. Research has been done here at San Diego on these kind of covers. In the past, EPA required covers that were really based on conditions in the east coast. Generally, things made out of clay. Here, clay dries out and cracks. Once something like this cracks, there's a conduit for moisture to get inside. Even though we don't have much rain, we want to keep what little rain we do out of this thing. So a lot of research has been done at San Diego and other places on other alternative kind of covers. We're proposing this kind of a cover for the landfill. One that will not crack, one that will use vegetation to help keep the moisture out. And again, the monitoring system we're going to put in a double monitoring system to make sure that nothing does get through this cover. Let me show a picture of it while we continue this discussion. Miles, I would like you to comment on that.

Here's the picture and the cover up. Okay. Not cover up per se, but the monitoring. It's just choice of words. The photograph shows the next waste landfill. I believe you're looking from the north toward the south. The small square to the left is the classified portion. And you can actually see the trench materials in the unclassified section to your right. Something John has said, which is interesting, I think we need to clarify, is that the cost for monitoring this landfill is a lot of money. And that's every year. As I pointed out before, much of materials can't containerize. This containerized in 55 gallon drums. The initial first few years, I wouldn't expect to see those materials showing up in his monitoring. How long do you think the Department of Energy is going to spend $120,000 a year monitoring vedosones, which don't show any contamination? They're going to scale that back very quickly. They've scaled back such monitoring before very quickly in other sites. So five years from now, 10 years from

now, 100 years from now, when the commitment to keep an eye on this has waned, that's when we're going to have to worry. You say that's no matter a fact, we John, is he correct? No, I don't think so. Our proposal is to monitor this indefinitely, if necessary. One thing about radioactive waste, a lot of a lot of people assume an idea to be if I took this job, that radioactive waste was dangerous waste, other waste was less dangerous. It really isn't the case. These wastes are different, are dangerous dependent on their circumstances. If I had a bucket of an industrial solvent sitting here in the desk and a block of cobalt 60, the cobalt 60 would be a big threat to me. The solvent would not, because really the solvent can't get to me. The cobalt 60 can't through its radioactivity. If you bury both of those things in the ground, the cobalt 60 is shielded. It's not going to get to you. However, the industrial solvent, which is a liquid, can get to the groundwater and can get to you. There are very few actual drums in this landfill, and the contents of those drums are not liquids.

They're things like protective clothing, mop heads, just stuff that was put in these things. We don't think that these drums are likely to breach at all, but if they do, there's nothing in there to be released. John, let me show you another graphic that we have, and I want to show you some more pictures that you provided us. This is what is just showing us here. This is a graphic of some geophysics that we did, and it shows essentially a magnetometer survey, and it shows metal content of the landfill. We did it because this service had been disturbed extensively, and we wanted to find out exactly where all the trenches and pits were. Okay, let me go on through this. This is one of the trenches in the unclassified area, with obviously some debris at one end. Same thing, another one of the trenches in the unclassified area. All of this looks like what you would say, I guess, safe material. It doesn't look like a whole lot of liquid, but here's this other one. Looking at these pictures, it would make me believe that there's not

very hazardous materials in this. Well, some of the materials are very hazardous. It's one reason why we're not proposing cleaning this up now. We don't want to expose workers to high levels of radioactivity, retrieving this stuff from the landfill. We also have a disposal problem. Not all of them during this landfill has no disposal path. Most of it does. There is some that we don't feel has any disposal path. We could end up generating a waste that we can't put back in the ground, can't store, and can't ship off. And if we do ship off this material, if we clean it up now, and if we do very expensively, excavate this rather dangerous landfill at the moment, we'd have to pack it up, ship it through Albuquerque by highway, and throw it in somebody else's backyard. Miles, those pictures look very innocent. And it's interesting to note that John provided those pictures for this show. One of the pictures I think is very telling, and that's the picture of the 55-gallon drums. John is very confident that these drums contain nothing but some mop heads and that sort of thing, and I disagree. If we had an accurate inventory, then I might agree with that, but I don't think we do. And it's also interesting to note that John

feels that these 55-gallon drums won't ever corrode or decay away at all. These are metal drums. Of course, they're going to corrode and decay away. This material is going to be hazardous for thousands of years. Those drums are not going to last that long. They're going to discharge their contents into this surrounding soil. Miles, you don't have to get involved in this at all. Why are you involved in a citizen's action group, and studying this whole issue? Well, thanks for asking. I started this as a member of the Citizens Advisory Board for San Diego National Labs. I joined that group about a year and a half ago. I was very excited about being involved with San Diego National Laboratories and some of the most intelligent scientists on earth work there. And I'd have a chance to contribute what I know as a physician to help environmental restoration of this site. I became very quickly disheartened with the Citizens Advisory Board. I found that even though there are excellent people on the board, very good people, the board unfortunately, I believe, is somewhat manipulated by the Department of Energy. They're DOE contractors that sit on the board,

people that used to work for the Department of Energy, people with extreme conflicts of interest. That being the case, it was difficult to accomplish anything of substance. I became so frustrated with that that I was one of the co-founders of citizen actions so that we could address this one. Thank you for admitting it. Very dangerous landfill at San Diego National Laboratories. We just don't want to see, and this is a physician, I just don't want to see people downstream, people in the South Valley of Albuquerque, people that has led a Pueblo. I don't want to see a hundred years from mysterious disease and cancer is showing up. John and I aren't going to be here, but it's not right. It's our responsibility to make sure those people are safe. Well, there's a huge point of contention whether the contamination will even reach these developments, whether it's Letta or Mesa del Sol. John, could you address that? Well, we don't think it will. We don't think there's going to be released in the landfill. And again, if there is, we have plenty of monitoring and place to tell us. If there is, we'll take whatever appropriate action is necessary. So I don't think it's time to do, to take appropriate action is when our monitoring wells have

determined that there's contamination in the groundwater or on its way to the groundwater, that's silly. One of the main reasons that San Diego doesn't want to clean us up is there, at least they say, is because of worker safety. Now, John mentioned Cobalt 60 is very dangerous. It's very radioactive. Cobalt 60 is so radioactive it burns itself out fairly quickly. Much of the Cobalt 60 that's there has been there for decades already and is already fairly safe. And if you look at the inventory, you'll notice that those Cobalt 60 sources were well shielded when they went into first place. Those scientists you saw in that picture were able to handle it and put it in there. They can just as easily handle it and take it out. That is the main obstacle that San Diego is verbalizing, at least, as to why the landfill can't be cleaned up. We believe the main reason that you don't want to want to clean it up right now is because of the cost. $30 million is a lot of money. Well, when you look at the Department of Energy's budget for the year and you calculate in the community safety, which is the Department of Energy routinely ignores it. Other sites across the country, I don't think $30 million is too much to spend.

What role should the community have in deciding the future of this waste out? I think they should have a large place in. That's why we have a citizens advisory board. That's why we've had public meetings for 10 years and finding the public community to tell us what their concerns are. Have you been involved in this? I've been involved in the citizens advisory board. John and I have talked about this offline. I think we agree there's a certain amount of inability of the citizens advisory board to accomplish advocacy for the community. That's really what it's supposed to be in an advocate for the community and it hasn't been that. Now, what we're trying to do, citizen action, is to get public meetings, public meetings that is led up to public meetings at the South Valley. Public meetings that are chaired by an independent group like the New Mexico Environment Department, not the Department of Energy so that multiple views could be expressed to the public and then they can come and we could hear what the community's values are in terms of this landfill. Does the community want it right in their backyard?

You mentioned Mesa Del Sol. There's nobody living there yet, but Ray Powell from the State Land Commission envisions 100,000 people living there a mile and a half in this landfill with wells sucking the groundwater in that direction. Those people ought to have some say and those people are definitely ought to know that in their backyard is a dangerous leaking. You could have waste them. John, if you decided to clean the the waste fill, would you have the technology to safely clean it up at this point? Well, possibly yes. It's great expense. We think we could do it. We think it'd be possibly dangerous for the workers and extremely expensive. That's why we don't really think it's necessary to do right now. This material is safe where it is and thank you Miles for pointing out how extremely hot or highly radioactive materials decay away quickly. We think that in a matter of say 40 years or so this will propose no threat to anyone in any way. Well, let's let's take a scenario. What if what if health of people living downstream is compromised at some point? Who is going to be liable for this? The Department of Energy would be liable.

Okay, and and the cleanup as well. Yes. So you were taking measures for that right now or you feel totally confident that that there's no need to go in there and clean it up. No, I think I am my family. We're residents of the South Valley. I don't feel threatened by this land and fill it all. And I'm in a position where if I did feel threatened about it, I could do something about it. What about what Miles was just talking about? They're trying to get public hearings with this letter group and all these organizations in the South Valley. Would you welcome their comments? Would you welcome their comments? Yes. Although we've we've had public meetings, we have them at community centers. We have them in the South Valley. We've had them all over the city. We've had the CAB meetings, citizens advisory board meetings, and our quarterly public meetings all over the city. But if the citizens want additional ones in the state of life dispenser, we have no opposition to that at all. The problem with that, John, is that this is the advisory board meetings and the quarterly meetings are attended by huge numbers of people from the Sandy and the Department of Energy. But if there's even one member of the public there, it's a big turn

out for the public. And that's because the Department of Energy doesn't make any effort really to make sure that people know what's happening and to invite their input. I've been to these meetings. I've been to these meetings for a year and a half. When people come up with a point of view that's a little bit different than what the Department of Energy wants to hear their ideas are not valued. And they're not encouraged to speak and they're not encouraged to participate. I've seen it over and over again. That's what would be different about a meeting that's not hosted by the Department of Energy. One that's hosted by the New Mexico Environment Department. Has a New Mexico Environment Department accepted your proposal to to cover the landfill at this point? Well our initial recommendation was not even to put a cover on it. We excavated a similar bit almost identical landfill called the Radwaysland for the radioactive waysland filters and tech area too. It contained essentially the same materials. It was closed 40 years earlier. This was not covered. Groundwater at this site is almost 200 feet shallower. There was no groundwater contamination. No spread of contamination from this

landfill. Efforts out there for 40 years and some of the hotter constituents were able to decay. We went in and cleaned it up. The reason we went in and cleaned that up mainly is because it was groundwater contamination at that site. We also did not have the good inventory of what's in that landfill like we do with the mixwise landfill. We had to investigate this to see if this was a positive source of the groundwater contamination. We found out that it wasn't what we did get this landfill cleaned up. Miles very quickly respond to that and then I'm going to give both of you an opportunity to tell people where to call it if they want to ask more questions. Great thank you. Thanks John for pointing out pointing that out. I've talked to the environmental restoration manager for the radioactive waste landfill. They did a variety of very ingenious things at gamma counters on the end of their cranes and they could make sure that the people that were cleaning it up were safe. I have full confidence in the scientists at Sandia. Sandia should be looking at the technology to clean this up, robotics, that sort of thing. That's what we envision our national labs doing. And if they were to put their substantial brain power in that direction,

we could get this thing cleaned up very quickly with no danger to public safety or to the safety of the workers. And I know we're not going to endanger the workers by cleaning this up because you wouldn't look that happen. I've seen it before, the other sites. You're very careful about workers safety. John, where can people get in touch with you? Well, I welcome people to give me a call. My phone number is 845-6089. If anyone has 6-0, repeat it one more time. 845-6089. If anyone has any questions, concerns, complaints, problems, whatever, please give me a call. I may not know the answer. I'm just a geologist. I had to pick a field of study that didn't involve a lot of math, but I have access to lots of really smart people. And if I don't know the answer to the question, I'll have one of those smart people call the person back and answer the question. Okay, Miles, your turn. And our C- people can get a hold of us at 280-1844, or they can look at our website, which is rad-free-n-m-r-a-d-f-r-e-e-n-m.com. In that website, you'll see this inventory. You'll see a map of the landfill,

and some of our views expressed. We're happy to talk with people about this as well. Additionally, I just want to point out that we're going to have a public meeting, our first public meeting at the South Broadway Cultural Center, this Thursday, the 13th from 6 to 9 p.m. I'd welcome anybody who'd like to come. We have an independent consultant that's just looked at this landfill. We're going to be reviewing his findings there. Some of the statements John has made may not be substantiated by some of the incredible findings this man has come up with. Great. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here today, too. Yeah. Okay. That's our report for this week. Next week, join us for our discussion on Medicare reimbursement rates in New Mexico and the high cost of prescription drugs. Until then, from all of us at K&M-E, I'm R.C. Chapa. Have a good evening. Major funding for Infocus is provided by the McEwen Charitable Foundation, enriching the cultural life, health, education, environment, and spiritual life of the citizens of New Mexico.