Nuclear Wildfires

The recent wildfires at Department of Energy nuclear sites are among the most
serious nuclear emergencies in the United States. In May the Cerro Grande fire
destroyed nearly 48,000 acres on and around the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New. Mexico. The Hanford wildfire in Washington raged over 192,000 acres in
late June. In late July a wildfire cut a swath about twelve miles long and four
miles wide at the DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory,
coming close to large amounts of stored nuclear wastes and forcing the
evacuation of 1,800 workers.

Nuclear-site wildfires burn off protective layers of soil and vegetation,
causing radioactive materials to be carried over great distances. Fires can
disrupt safety systems at nuclear facilities, leading to loss of power and
ventilation. They can ignite waste areas containing solvents, hydrogen and
flammable forms of nuclear materials. And these wildfires are increasing. So
far, 6.4 million acres have burned this season, 3.5 million acres above the
ten-year national average. According to the Forest Service, there is an acute
shortage of resources to fight such fires.

Destruction of vegetation creates flooding risks and radioactive and
hazardous-waste runoff into water supplies. At Los Alamos, the Cerro Grande fire
denuded the mountains surrounding the forty-three-square-mile mesas containing
the lab and several watersheds that feed into the Rio Grande. It affected more
than 600 radioactive and hazardous dumpsites and several contaminated canyons
running through the lab property, where there have been decades of effluent
disposal. The Clinton Administration is scrambling to build a seventy-foot dam
at Los Alamos to prevent flash floods from washing through a heavily
contaminated reactor and into the community of White Rock, New Mexico.

Runoff and floods could carry about 300,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil,
the equivalent of a football field 300 feet high, into the largest freshwater
artery in the state. Higher-than-average levels of plutonium and other
contaminants are already showing up in the river. Because of the magnitude of
deforestation, these dangers will persist at Los Alamos for many years.

The untold story of the Cerro Grande fire is that it could have been much worse
had it not been for local activists. In 1998, after the DOE issued a draft
Environmental Impact Statement for Los Alamos, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear
Safety and others criticized the DOE's failure to consider the impact of
wildfires on the site. To their credit, the DOE and the laboratory performed a
wildfire risk analysis and reduced dry vegetation around Area G, which contains
a large amount of nuclear waste. Had they not done this, the fire would have
reached barrels of plutonium waste, causing them to burst and spread deadly
contamination.

Some of the DOE's most dangerous nuclear wastes are outside and unprotected. The
Hanford fire hit the "B/C" waste disposal trenches, which probably contain more
radioactivity than the entire contaminant inventory at Los Alamos. Airborne
plutonium concentrations carried to the nearby cities of Pasco and Richland were
1,000 times above normal background radiation levels.

The fire also came close to hitting a storage area with a large number of
barrels containing flammable uranium waste chips. According to the notes of an
internal meeting at Hanford in April 1998, a single drum, once it ignites, would
send flames as high as twenty to thirty feet. The DOE didn't move the barrels to
a safer place because it wanted to avoid state environmental controls.

The DOE is ill prepared to deal with wildfires at its numerous facilities. Over
the past ten years several major nuclear weapons sites have been closed, leaving
large amounts of unstable nuclear materials in deteriorating facilities�some
dating back to World War II. This problem has been put on the back burner,
because it's very expensive to solve and because it competes for funds with
nuclear weapons activities and environmental compliance agreements with states
and the Environmental Protection Agency. A major portion of the 189 tons of
highly enriched uranium at the Oak RidgeY-12 weapons plant in Tennessee is
combustible and is stored in old wooden buildings. If the uranium metal catches
fire, using water will generate hydrogen, which could be like adding gasoline to
the blaze.

Monitoring systems at DOE sites are inadequate. During the Los Alamos fire, the
DOE failed to deploy readily available aircraft to measure contaminants in the
smoke and to perform remote sensing to look for hot spots. Firefighters are not
afforded the same protections as radiation workers; recently 100 of them stormed
off the Los Alamos site because of health and safety concerns.

Nuclear explosives in wooden buildings, disruption of unprotected and heavily
contaminated areas, and the subsequent migration of contaminants into water
supplies have not been high government priorities. The wildfires at Los Alamos,
Hanford and the Idaho lab should be a wake-up call to Washington to put these
concerns on the DOE's short list right away. We also owe local activists near
DOE sites a debt of thanks. 

Robert Alvarez is a former senior policy adviser to the Secretary of Energy.
From The Nation, September 18/25, 2000