[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION: Los Alamos landfill

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Carefully Cleaning Up the Garbage at Los Alamos


By MICHAEL COOPER
New York Times
October 24, 2009

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan 
Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down 
there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the 
world's first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert 
sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus 
money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the 
scientists who built the world's first atomic bomb. They are approaching 
the job like an archeological dig — only with even greater care, since 
some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while 
others may be explosive.

The dump has become part of the $6 billion stimulus program to clean up 
the toxic legacy of the arms race, which is one of the biggest sources 
of direct federal contracts in the $787 billion stimulus act. More than 
$1.9 billion is being spent at the Hanford site in Washington, the home 
of the nuclear reactor that made the plutonium for the atomic bomb that 
was dropped on Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion is being spent cleaning up 
a Savannah River site, in South Carolina.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24alamos.html?hpw



--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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