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For officials of the City and County of Santa Fe, the Buckman Direct Diversion (BDD) drinking water project is absolutely essential for future water supplies. For citizens and community groups who have spent years documenting the toxic legacy of Los Alamos National Laboratory, there remain serious concerns about the environmental and public health impacts of the Buckman project.
The BDD project, scheduled to start operating in 2011, will deliver almost 3 billion gallons of Río Grande water annually. The BDD’s initial permitted capacity will be 8,730 acre-feet per year (afy), with 5,230afy (60%) for the City, 1,700afy (19%) for the County, and 1,800afy (21%) for Las Campanas.
Based on many years of sampling in White Rock Canyon, analysis of LANL data and NMED reports, and independent expert analysis, Amigos Bravos and Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS) published a report in 2007 on the impacts of LANL’s 60+ year toxic legacy on the canyons and streams running down from the lab’s site on the Pajarito Plateau to the Río Grande. We also helped found a community- and Pueblo-based group called Communities for Clean Water.
Our independent hydrologist documented that LANL contaminants could have begun reaching the Río Grande within 26 years (the lab began discharges in 1944) and that LANL contaminants were entering the Buckman well field. Until our analysis, LANL management had claimed that it would take tens of thousands of years for any contaminants to reach the river.
Plutonium has been found in soils north of the Buckman well field and it has also been found in Buckman Well No. 1, the well closest to the Río Grande.
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Plutonium has been found in soils north of the Buckman well field and it has also been found in Buckman Well No. 1, the well closest to the Río Grande. The canyons running down from LANL’s site regularly fail to meet state water quality standards. Some of the contaminants found in these canyons include PCBs, radium-226 and radium-228, selenium, mercury, and gross alpha (a measure of a group of alpha emitting radionuclides that can include such things as Americium-241, Plutonium-236, Uranium-238, Thorium-232, Radium-226, Radon-222, Polonium-210).
Monitoring by the NMED showed some soils at LANL with PCB levels 25,000 times the level protective of human health. A new study this year showed those levels had increased to 38,000 times the human health standard. In 2007, the NMED issued its first ever “Do Not Eat” fish advisory for PCBs for waters from Abiquiu Reservoir to Cochiti Reservoir, including White Rock Canyon. LANL denied that the PCBs came from them, but an independent study proved conclusively that LANL is the source of the PCBs in the Río Grande.
At a June 2008 Citizens’ Advisory Board groundwater meeting, LANL admitted that they had been incorrect in claiming that there were no radionuclides in the City water supply wells. CCNS found that the maximum levels of radionuclides associated with nuclear weapons manufacturing have increased for the following elements in the wells:
- Cesium-137 has more than doubled
- Potassium-40 has almost doubled
- Radium-226 has increased 63%
- Tritium has increased 68%
- Uranium (measured) has increased from 0 to 18.4 pCi/L
(pico-Curies per Liter)
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