Dear Santa Fe: Lest we forget, there is a hazardous waste dump called Area G just a few miles from the Plaza.
This marks the second week of wrangling among activists, Los Alamos National Lab (which owns the waste pit) and the New Mexico Environment Department on LANL’s proposal to close Area G; what happens to the radioactive material there will depend not only on the determination of activists like Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (above, right) but also on LANL’s own future—which in turn depends on a slew of high-level nuke policy talks. After the jump, a round-up of recent nuclear developments and their implications for New Mexico. Continue reading »
Tags: Area G, CCNS, citizen action, Dave McCoy, doe, Joni Arends, LANL, Los Alamos, Los Alamos National Labs, new mexico, new start, nuclear, nuclear policy, Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear weapons, obama, sandia lab, Sandia National Lab, start treaty
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The New Mexico “Green Jobs Cabinet report” was released yesterday. It’s 98 pages of wonkery not intended for the casual reader.
Not to nitpick—or fearmonger—but there’s a word missing in the report. It’s kind of important. The word is earthquakes.
Although the report spends a good amount of space assessing New Mexico’s potential for geothermal energy—and exploring “Synergies with the Oil and Gas Industry”—it fails to mention, even in passing, one major potential downside of this particular “green” power source: It can cause earthquakes. Continue reading »
Tags: earthquake, geothermal, green jobs, LANL, nuclear
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Why LANL’s latest media dust-up shouldn’t be taken lightly.
On Monday, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board released a damning report on the safety of the main plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The crux of the report is that in the case of a “seismic event,” or major earthquake, along the geologic fault that underlies the lab, the ensuing damage (think earthquake triggers fire triggers big radioactive explosion) would be more than 100 times the allowable federal standard.
Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. Continue reading »
Tags: earthquake, LANL, nuclear
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