As Fire Rages at Los Alamos National Lab, Plans in the Works to Build a Plutonium Bomb Factory

The Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico is still burning. It is rapidly growing by the day. On June 29, I did a phone interview with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and his colleague Scott Kovac; and sit down conversation with Marian Naranjo, a prominent native American elder and activist from the Santa Clara Pueblo and Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. As you’ll see, the Las Conchas Fire has woken us up. It is time we learn from this deadly fire and stop a proposed plutonium bomb factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I’ll tell you how your voice is crucial in this matter, but first here is an update on the fire that is also burning Santa Clara Pueblo lands.

Las Conchas Fire Update

On the morning of June 28, when I posted my first piece on the subject, the Las Conchas Fire had burned about 50,000 acres. As of Tuesday, July 5th it had burned 127,821 and is the largest fire in New Mexico history. Mother Nature is in a frenzied state right now and breaking record after record on wildfires across states. Last month Arizona broke their record with the Wallow Fire.

If you’re not right underneath the smoke it is difficult to get a sense of the scale of a large fire. NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over the area on June 28. Following day NASA released a photo of smoke over land that you can check out here. Last year smoke over Moscow made international headlines. Siberia was ablaze also and NASA released a fascinating image of smoke over Siberia and the adjacent Arctic Seas, also taken by the Aqua satellite that you can check out here. According to NASA the fires over central Russia, Siberia and Canada during summer 2010 created an enormous poisonous ring around the northern hemisphere. Unfortunately it didn’t get coverage in the US press and media. Nevertheless very large fires send a lot of toxic pollutants into the air that are hazardous to human health.

The wind has spread the Las Conchas Fire generally in a north–south direction. If the fire had expanded east toward the Area G, where 20,000 drums (each 55 gallons) of plutonium contaminated waste are sitting on the surface inside fabric tents, air in our region probably would have been nuked by now, but that is not the case, so far.

We do not know what ecological and human health impact the Las Conchas Fire will leave behind, but since the fire started we’ve been very concerned about what’s in Area G and is there any possibility that the fire could reach there? In a June 27 article, when asked by an AP writer a LANL spokesperson “declined to confirm that there were any such drums now on the property.” In a June 30 AP article, asked by the same writer another LANL spokesperson said that there are 10,000 drums stored there. Why didn’t the government tell us the truth, the first time? And, are we still getting the truth—10,000 is not same as 20,000, but who is counting?

Joni Arends told me, “After the Dome Fire of 1996, we asked for hardened onsite storage for these drums. They did nothing. Then after the devastating Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 that burned 47,000 acres including 5,000 acres inside LANL, we pressed for it again. They laughed at us and told us that by the time they get the permit to build the hardened storage, all the drums will be offsite. Here we are 11 years later, 20,000 drums containing plutonium contaminated waste are still sitting stacked three high inside fabric tents between a super volcano—Valles Caldera to the west and the Rio Grande River, our main water source to the east, on an active seismic zone, in a forested wildfire habitat.”