Roger Snodgrass wrote an excellent article, on 9/16/2010 in the Santa Fe New Mexican, titled Contaminated pipe halts LANL cleanup project: Cylinder exceeds allowed radiation. Work has been shut down on the cleanup of the old landfill on DP Road dating from 1945 after a worker discovered a plutonium contaminated pipe and surrounding soil that had radiation levels that exceeded by six times those permitted above ground during the cleanup. The pipe and the soil it was buried in were measured to contain the equivalent of 40 grams of plutonium-239. Before cleanup began, the whole 5-acre site was estimated from soil sampling to contain only 200 grams of plutonium.
I live near this cleanup site and I'm not happy that the LANL spokesman, Fred deSousa, said the public was not notified about this discovery because, to quote Roger Snodgrass's article, "there had been no radioactive release to the public and no exposure". Regardless, the public SHOULD have been informed. LANL is not being very transparent about what's going on at the landfill cleanup.
The talk is that the landfill will be cleaned up to residential housing standards. I don't plan to ever live there. It's bad enough that we live so close to the cleanup site.
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