Editor’s note: This is a three-part series that looks at a landmark report that provides the first detailed and independent assessment of the environmental and health legacy of the Manhattan project and the world’s first nuclear explosion.
Ten-Year Probe Offers First View Of Los Alamos ReleasesAfter 10 years of sifting through thousands of pages of classified records and overcoming secrecy obstacles at the nuclear weapons lab, independent investigators have provided the first rough estimates of radioactive and toxic releases from Los Alamos National Laboratory dating back to its earliest operations and the potential health impact of the nation’s first atomic bomb blast on ranchers and other nearby residents in New Mexico. Investigators for the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) project released a draft final report in late June that—while far from definitive in its conclusions—said there was persuasive evidence from spotty, decades-old emissions monitoring data that radioactive releases during Los Alamos’ early years were so significant that they could dwarf the cumulative releases from all of the Energy Department’s other early nuclear weapons production sites. In particular, the researchers said that although the lab did not monitor emissions from many of its earliest plutonium processing facilities, fragmentary records—especially “industrial hygiene,” or worker safety, reports from 1955 and 1956—suggest plutonium releases in the late 1940s and early 1950s were much higher than has been acknowledged by the government to date. “[D]ocuments discovered in this study indicate that airborne plutonium releases from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) before the 1970s were significantly higher than has been officially reported…,” said the report, which noted the crudeness of LANL’s early plutonium processing facilities and their lack of emissions controls. In addition to documentary evidence, the report said computer analyses of soil samples taken near some historic facilities “indicated that airborne plutonium releases from LANL operations could have been hundreds of times higher than the 1.2 curies officially reported,” although the LAHDRA researchers acknowledged those modeling results involved “a high degree of uncertainty.” However, the report added that if further studies were done to determine emissions from some of those early facilities—particularly the DP West Building 12—estimates of plutonium releases could rise even higher because those sources were not monitored by LANL or reflected in estimates of plutonium historically released from the site. “If airborne plutonium releases from DP West Building 12 stacks between 1948 and 1955 were as high as the 1956 reports by the lab’s industrial hygiene staff indicate, plutonium releases from LANL could easily exceed the independently reconstructed airborne plutonium release totals from the production plants at Hanford, Rocky Flats and Savannah River combined, even without the other sources and other years at LANL included,” the report said. The LAHDRA study, done by several contractors working for the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the new release estimates for plutonium and for beryllium, a toxic metal, raise significant health impact questions because the emissions came from old Los Alamos facilities that were surprisingly close—in some cases, several hundred feet—to living quarters for scientists working at the lab when the atomic bomb was first developed, tested and produced in the 1940s and early 1950s. The report also paints an arresting picture of some of the potential public health implications of the July 1945 Trinity test, the first time an atomic bomb was exploded. While it is common knowledge that all aspects of the government’s crash program to develop the atomic bomb during World War II were routinely cloaked in total secrecy, the report provides sobering new details about how ranchers and other ordinary citizens living nearby the Trinity test site were told nothing about the blast nor given any guidance about avoiding the health impacts of radioactive fallout—even as scientists and others working on the project took precautions and avoided known hot spots created by the explosion. Since the release of the report June 29, LANL officials have not explicitly challenged the assertions by LAHDRA researchers that early Los Alamos releases were much higher than the government has previously acknowledged. However, they have strongly implied those assertions are wrong by stating that the crucial 1956 industrial hygiene reports relied on by LAHDRA researchers contained a mathematical error that inflated release estimates. “The LAHDRA report says that [1956 industrial hygiene reports] imply the need for a factor-of-20 correction” raising release estimates,” LANL said in a July 31 technical response to the LAHDRA report. “In contrast, we show that [1956 reports’] calculations of the stack releases are a factor of 20 too high because of a mathematical error.” LAHDRA officials say they are reviewing LANL’s contentions about the mathematical error, but maintain that even if that is correct, the documents they unearthed in their probe still collectively show that the lab’s estimate of early releases are substantially too low. Among other things, they say LANL estimates do not account for huge gaps in the monitoring records at D Plant, DP West and other historic production facilities that all involved knew were highly contaminated, with one worker describing D Plant as “hot as a firecracker.” The LAHDRA report is a milestone because Los Alamos is the most secretive U.S. nuclear weapons production site—and the last to open its records to investigators seeking to delineate the potential health impact of early operations. Those operations tended to have the largest releases because initial production methods did not have basic emissions controls, bomb program managers were under extreme time pressure to deliver warheads, there was a lack of full scientific knowledge in the earliest days about the hazards of certain radioactive and toxic materials—and government officials knew that by operating under blanket secrecy, they would not be held accountable for any potential health impacts of releases. The LAHDRA investigators are careful to say that due to the general paucity of emissions monitoring and worker exposure and dose data from early operations, their research did not find any clear evidence that those living near Los Alamos suffered ill health effects from weapons-related releases. However, they said the scope and nature of some releases—particularly plutonium and beryllium—were significant enough to warrant follow-up studies by the CDC if the government wants to better determine potential doses to people who were exposed. The same sort of “dose reconstruction” projects have been conducted at many of DOE’s other major weapons production sites. Whether that will occur is questionable because such dose reconstruction reports have not only exposed embarrassing details about the way the government conducted past nuclear weapons operations, they have provided fodder for lawsuits against DOE and its contractors alleging negligent treatment of weapons complex workers and nearby communities. At Los Alamos, the issue is complicated by the longstanding and entrenched secrecy that has characterized the most sensitive of U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. Although some critics have questioned the need for keeping secret data and documents about weapons production operations that occurred there decades ago, the government continues to keep tight clamps on much of that information, contending it could still provide valuable how-to information to hostile nations or terrorists intent on fashioning crude nuclear weapons. In that vein, the LAHDRA researchers said they repeatedly ran into roadblocks from Los Alamos and DOE officials in their attempts to get access to emissions monitoring data and other key historical operating records. “Access to classified documents at Los Alamos has been more difficult than CDC personnel or LAHDRA team members have experienced at any of the other DOE sites that have been subjects of dose reconstruction investigations,” the report said, citing “frequent” LANL demands that LAHDRA analysts “re-establish need-to-know” and pre-screening of documents by LANL legal staff and other officials to block access to “privileged information” and “deniable-category” data. Some of the difficulties were not surprising given the huge security concerns raised throughout DOE’s weapons complex following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon. Similarly, the LAHDRA researchers were periodically stymied by security clamp-downs that were imposed at Los Alamos in the wake of numerous breakdowns in the lab’s protection of sensitive data over the last decade, such as the loss of control over classified computer disks. In the end, the LAHDRA investigators said they were able to overcome most of their access problems, and they expressed confidence that they were able to review most of the existing records relevant to their probe. However, they noted that they had to establish an appeal process under which a CDC official with appropriate security clearances was able to review certain documents withheld by Los Alamos or other federal agencies to verify that they contained no relevant information on releases. “Because documents in these categories included nuclear weapons design details, foreign intelligence and other types of information that are truly not relevant to studies of off-site releases or health effects, it does not appear that any information needed for dose reconstruction was withheld,” the report said in its finding on that issue. But it added: “The existence of [the] appeal process…was a key consideration in the adoption of that conclusion.” Next: Potential Health Impacts Of Early Los Alamos Releases August 12, 2009 Study Of Early Los Alamos Releases Raises Health Issues(Second in the series) While saying there is no clear evidence that scientists and other workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory suffered health effects from radioactive and toxic releases from early nuclear weapons operations at the site, a new report has recommended “further evaluation” of newly discovered data showing plutonium emissions more than 100 times greater than officially acknowledged from production facilities that were close to residential areas of the lab during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The draft report by the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) project, done by independent contractors working for the Centers for Disease Control, says emissions monitoring and other Los Alamos records uncovered during a 10-year investigation suggest plutonium and beryllium releases, in particular, could have affected those living at the site. In particular, the researchers say an initial assessment of emissions releases shows people living in nine residential areas at Los Alamos may have been put at risk by elevated emissions from facilities that were in some cases only several hundred feet away. The health issue is raised by the unusually close proximity of former living areas to historic weapons production operations at Los Alamos, which was unique among U.S. nuclear weapons sites in that regard. The report said Los Alamos essentially was forced to locate housing very near operational areas because of the difficult topography of the site and the urgent need to house scientists working on the crash effort during World War II to build the first nuclear weapon at the New Mexico site. “Pressure to provide housing and the limited availability of suitable land in the region of finger-like mesas and canyons led to the development of housing that in some cases was much closer to operational areas than has been customary for government facilities that undertake processing of nuclear materials and high explosives and/or operation of devices such as reactors or high-energy particle accelerators,” said the report, which was released in June. “Based on reviews of historical documents that were performed, nine locations were identified as being among the sites where historical operations that took place appear to warrant evaluation in terms of potential off-site releases or health effects.” Among other areas of the concern, the report noted that the so-called Sundt apartments were located about 600 feet from D Building, an early plutonium processing facility in the original Technical Area 1 at Los Alamos that had limited emissions controls and monitoring devices on its 85 rooftop vents. The report also cited a trailer park used from 1948 to 1963 that was located on the rim of Los Alamos Canyon about a half-mile west of the DP-West building, another early plutonium facility that had some emissions-catching filters but where inaccurate monitoring techniques led to substantial underestimates of releases, according to the LAHDRA researchers. The trailer park was also next to Material Disposal Area B, a radioactive waste burial ground that experienced a major fire in 1948, and was “situated directly above Omega Site, where five versions of nuclear reactors were operated on the canyon floor because of perceived dangers of associated operations,” the report added. “When flexible tubing was run up the wall of Los Alamos Canyon and tied to a tree atop South Mesa to serve as the release point for gases released from the reactors, airborne radioactivity was released at roughly the same elevation as trailer park residents.” The report said the potential health threat posed by D Building and the DP West site were made clear by newly discovered documents that indicated plutonium releases from DP West, in particular, were much higher than had been acknowledged by Los Alamos. “Plutonium was processed in crude facilities in D Building during World II, and many roof-top vents were unfiltered and unmonitored,” the report said. “After DP West Site took over production in 1945, there was some filtering of releases, but poor monitoring practices caused releases to be underestimated. “Documents indicate that DP West releases for 1948-1955 alone were over 100 times the total reported by the lab for operations before 1973. A screening-level assessment of public exposures from releases of plutonium in 1949 showed that airborne plutonium releases warrant further evaluation.” On other contaminants of concern, the report said: Substantial processing of beryllium, a toxic metal that can cause lung disease, occurred “very close” to residential areas and preliminary analyses indicated that beryllium levels in those areas could have exceeded current federal occupational safety limits. Enriched uranium releases do not appear to pose high health threats, but depleted uranium releases “warrant further investigation.” At the same time, the report said overall uranium risks remained unclear because existing studies did not look at early releases that “could have been much larger than those from the 1970s forward.” While tritium was used in large amounts at Los Alamos, the lab has no data on tritium releases prior to 1967 and tritium data after that date is questionable because records indicate “numerous episodic releases within the 22-year period of tritium usage for which official reports of LANL releases include no data for the radionuclide.” On the early plutonium releases, the report noted that while initial screenings indicated those releases were large, the LAHDRA researchers did not have the time or resources to do the extensive and complex analyses that would be needed to determine if those releases caused high exposures or doses among Los Alamos residents. And because plutonium releases at Los Alamos generally were not measured or were poorly quantified and reported until 1978, the researchers sought other indicators of early releases, including examining past studies of plutonium levels in soil nearby historic Los Alamos production facilities and looking at records on plutonium in tissues collected by the government from deceased Los Alamos workers. The report said some of the soil analyses pointed to higher plutonium releases than acknowledged by the lab, and that those concerns were effectively confirmed by a 1955-1956 study by Los Alamos industrial hygiene—or worker safety—officials that found that improper stack monitoring methods used at DP West had substantially underestimated early plutonium releases from that facility. The researchers said the 1955-1956 study recommended corrections to stack monitoring methods that were subsequently adopted by Los Alamos—thus verifying the accuracy of the study’s conclusions. Interestingly, the report said the same 1955-1956 study raised major questions about another soil study done by two Los Alamos scientists in 1958 that lab officials still point to as providing the best evidence substantiating their claims of much lower plutonium emissions from early operations. The 1958 study looked at plutonium in soil around the DP West Site up to the radius of a mile. In analyzing 40 soil samples, the scientists conducting the study used results from only six samples to reach their conclusions about DP West releases because plutonium levels at those six sampling sites showed—in the words of the scientists—“rather remarkable agreement”—with historic data from stack monitoring records at DP West. Samples showing higher plutonium concentrations were thrown out by the scientists as flawed findings of “extraneous contamination.” However, the LAHDRA researchers said the authors of the 1958 study were apparently unaware of—or ignored—the previous 1955-1956 study that showed faulty stack monitoring at DP West. As a result, the six low plutonium samples used in the 1958 study were in agreement with stack monitoring data that LAHDRA says is incorrect and known to be well below actual plutonium releases from DP West. Los Alamos officials strongly contest the 1955-1956 study cited by LAHDRA researchers as showing releases from DP West were underestimated. They say a mathematical error in the 1955-1956 study resulted in LAHDRA officials substantially over-inflating DP West releases. However, lab officials have not explicitly challenged the overall assertions in the LAHDRA report that early plutonium releases from Los Alamos were significantly higher than acknowledged by the government to date. Next: Hidden Health Legacy Of The Trinity Test August 13, 2009 Ranchers Left Out In Cold In First U.S. A-Bomb Test(Third in the series) Ranchers and other New Mexico residents living downwind of the Trinity atomic bomb site were never told about the possible health effects of radioactive fallout from the nation’s first nuclear explosion in 1945, with the government allowing them to continue to grow vegetables and drink water collected off their roofs even as radioactive particles snowed down on them for days after the blast, according to a new report. While the total secrecy surrounding the Trinity test is well-known and accepted as a wartime necessity to prevent any premature disclosure of the new weapon, the new report from the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA) project provides sobering new details about the public health risks of the bomb blast and the government’s failure to inform affected New Mexicans—even after World War II when they faced clear residual contamination threats. “To preserve the secrecy of the atomic bomb mission, residents of New Mexico were not warned before the July 16, 1945, Trinity blast or informed of residual health hazards afterward, and no residents were evacuated,” said the report. At the same time, the report noted the blast produced extremely high radiation levels miles away from the blast site, saying “exposure rates on the day of the world’s first nuclear explosion measured up to 15 to 20 rem in public areas northeast of ground zero at distances around 20 miles, near Hoot Owl Canyon.” The report also paints a discomfiting picture of military and Los Alamos officials taking measures to protect themselves from fallout and avoid highly contaminated areas while average citizens went about their daily lives oblivious to the radiation to which they were being exposed. “Different standards of safety were applied to informed project workers than to uninformed members of the public,” the report said. “Project workers knew enough to evacuate areas when high exposure rates were measured, to wear respirators, to close their windows and breathe through a slice of bread, and to bury their contaminated food rather than eat it,” the study said. “But members of the public did not realize that changes in their behavior were prudent, and project staff did not call for evacuations or protective measures….” The report appears to question the decision not to evacuate nearby residents, noting that Los Alamos officials did not follow through on plans to evacuate people if radiation readings from the blast exceeded certain benchmarks. “Even though exposure rates, total exposures, and alpha count rates exceeding pre-established limits were measured and projected; a ‘cover story’ was in place that would have provided an avenue for relatively inconspicuous evacuation of selected residents; and evacuation personnel, vehicles, shelters and supplies were on standby, no evacuations of members of the public were conducted,” said the report. The report also noted that after the Trinity test, some local newspapers carried the government’s cover story for the explosion that an ammunition magazine had accidentally blown up. The LAHDRA researchers also said the government did little to protect residents from residual contamination risks after World War II was over, with the exception of a few visits by government medical personnel to check on some affected families, again operating under cover stories. “Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, the atomic bomb project and the roles of Los Alamos and Trinity were described publicly, and the need for secrecy diminished, the reasons for these visits were not disclosed to the residents,” the report said. “Although concern was voiced for the health status of at least one family, no evidence was found of steps being taken to reduce exposures to ranchers who continued to live in the fallout zone after July 1945.” The LAHDRA report was done by independent contractors for the Centers for Disease Control who received unprecedented access to thousands of classified files at Los Alamos in a 10-year project that was slowed by security restrictions at the secretive nuclear weapons facility. While not challenging the need for secrecy about the Trinity test—or judging the appropriateness of not telling affected citizens during difficult war-time circumstances—the LAHDRA researchers say some documents suggest some of the secrecy may have been due to government desires to “minimize legal claims” about potential radiation-related injuries. Some sources suggest similar legal concerns may be prompted by the release of the LAHDRA report if relatives of those exposed in the Trinity blast were to seek compensation from the government. Sources say two lawsuits already have been filed against the government following findings in other sections of the LAHDRA report that plutonium releases from past nuclear weapons operations at Los Alamos were higher than have been acknowledged by the lab. In reviewing records on the Trinity blast and its aftermath, the LAHDRA researchers said they found no clear evidence that any people exposed to the heavy fallout from the blast suffered ill health effects in later years. However, they did determine that existing analyses of public exposures from the Trinity did not include likely internal exposures to people who drank contaminated water or ate tainted vegetables, milk or other locally produced food. The report suggested those internal exposures could have been particularly important for residents living in areas that received massive fallout of radioactive particles, such as one canyon known to Los Alamos scientists as Hot Canyon. “Ranchers reported that fallout ‘snowed down’ on local surfaces for days after the blast,” the report said. “A rancher whose house was 20 miles northeast of Trinity reported that ‘for four or five days after [the blast], a white substance like flour settled on everything. “Because local ground water was not palatable to humans, many local residents collected rain water off their metal roofs into cisterns and used it for drinking water. It is documented that it rained the night after the test, so fresh fallout was likely consumed in collected water. “Livestock were raised in the area, with most ranches having one or more dairy cows and one ranch near Hot Canyon maintaining a herd of 200 goats.” “Because…lifestyles of local ranchers led to intakes of radioactivity via consumption of water, milk and homegrown vegetables, it appears that internal radiation doses could have posed significant health risks for individuals exposed after the blast,” the report concluded. |
