Dixon growers fear lab's effect on the region's 'food basket'
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6/29/2008 - 6/30/08
DIXON — The market at the heart of this little village is stuffed with locally grown produce. Fat, red radishes — just hours from the field — are so tempting they practically fly out of the display basket next to the cash register.
Nourished by a small river that empties into the nearby Rio Grande, the narrow valley is dotted with farms, orchards and vineyards. "Almost everybody grows a garden," said Sheri Kotowski, sitting one breezy spring afternoon under an old apple tree behind the market.
Small wonder, then, that Kotowski and others in this canyon southwest of Taos keep a wary eye on their big, mesa-top neighbor, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
They're fretting these days about a U.S. Department of Energy proposal to have the nuclear weapons lab increase its production of plutonium pits, the core of nuclear warheads, from a few each year to as many as 80.
It's part of a restructuring plan for the eight sites in the nation's nuclear weapons complex that DOE says is aimed at making the complex smaller, more secure and less expensive.
"We need to consolidate, and make it more of a 21st-century national security enterprise," said John Broehm, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos, the only place where pits are manufactured, produced 11 pits last year and will produce six this year, according to the NNSA.
Under the restructuring proposal preferred by DOE — one of several it offered up for public comment this year — the nuclear operations footprint at Los Alamos would be shrunk by almost half. Plutonium and other nuclear materials would be consolidated from a half-dozen sites on the sprawling lab property to two sites with more modern facilities.
Joe Martz, project director with the lab's nuclear weapons program, says that would mean a dramatic improvement in safety and security.
"We are still working with many of these materials in World War II vintage buildings," Martz said.
The movement of material would be reduced, as would the number of areas that have to be secured, he said.
And even 80 pits a year is just a fraction of what was produced at Rocky Flats, the Colorado plant that was the federal government's main pit production facility until it was shut in 1989, Martz said.
"There are some that worry we will become a pit factory. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.
But there has been a barrage of objections — philosophical, political, environmental, fiscal — to the proposal some critics call "the bombplex."
Kotowski and others contend the plan should be shelved because the DOE hasn't done an adequate analysis of the possible effects on farmland.
"LANL is located within the food basket of Northern New Mexico," said the New Mexico Acequia Association, which told DOE it is concerned about potential radioactive contamination of land and water and the proposal's impact on water use. Acequias are the irrigation ditches that feed farmland.
Some 40 miles northeast and downwind of Los Alamos, the Embudo Valley was reminded after the huge Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 just how close a neighbor the lab is. The fire rained ash on the area and cloaked it in smoke.
A citizens' group, in conjunction with the state Environment Department, began monitoring air and sampling soil and produce for radionuclides, in an effort to determine exposure levels in the area.
Of concern thus far are exceptionally high levels of strontium, cesium and plutonium at a site high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above the valley, at the top of the watershed.
The lab says that's to be expected, because global fallout brought to earth by rain and snow gets concentrated at such high elevations — in this case, 11,415 feet. The Environment Department suggests it could also represent either routine or accidental releases from Los Alamos over decades.
In any event, said Kotowski, "If you have contamination at the top of the mountain, you can't expect it to stay at the top of the mountain." The Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring Group plans more testing below the site this summer.
Kotowski and other critics say a comprehensive regional environmental health assessment is needed before DOE considers expanding the lab's operations.
And the state Environment Department says cleanup of the lab's 60-year "legacy of pollution" — not expanded pit production — should be the DOE's priority.
"They want to expand, but they haven't cleaned up the other stuff," said Craig Quanchello, the governor of Picuris Pueblo, a small Indian tribe in the valley. "We all live here. We're traditional. We're not going anywhere. We're the ones who have to live with however they damage Mother Earth."
Opponents say the pit plan is premature, since the nation's "nuclear posture" is due to be reviewed again in 2009 under a new administration.
And they dispute the need for new pits, saying the U.S. already has thousands that would be good for decades.
The NNSA plans to issue a final decision by the end of the year about which restructuring plan to pursue.
"If we don't start acting now to transform the complex, it'll get far too expensive to maintain," Broehm said. "We need to act now to start the process."
