June 29, 2011
Summer wildfires are drawing near Lthe birthplace of the atomic bomb.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, built as Site Y of the Manhattan Project, is today used for research, including weapons engineering. The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated and the lab temporarily closed. Some pictures of the lividly lit skies on the lab's Flickr page.
As of noon yesterday, The fire was only two miles miles distant from Area G, a "material disposition" site for plutonium-contaminated material, where around 30,000 55-gallon drums of Cold-War-era waste sit above ground, on concrete, under a plastic tent. Nothing to worry about, say officials.
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Nothing to see here, move along. Why is it I don't believe 'the officials' anymore?
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Because Japan was supposed to be even more safety-conscious than the U.S.ofA. and then the ClusterFukashima happened?
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I can only assume that "nobody is worried" because plutonium on fire isn't any more dangerous than plutonium not on fire.
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I think the potential concern is that the stuff in those barrels includes things like clothing, equipment and generalised trash from back when regulations weren't so stringent. So there's a whole bunch of still-radioactive stuff in there which, in a worst-case scenario where the fire's heat ruptures the metal drums, would burn. In that scenario, you'd get smoke and ash full of radioactive particles that the wind could then disperse. Probably not going to happen. But still.