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Public Meeting re Controversial Tritium Release at Los Alamos

October 30, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

Second Public Meeting for Controversial
Tritium Releases at the Los Alamos Lab

Thursday November 5 at 5:00 pm MT
register here for the event and to speak and/or ask questions

Because of overwhelming public demand and technical problems with the first virtual public meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration is holding a second meeting on the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL’s) controversial plan to vent up to 100,000 curies of tritium gas. Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, used to boost the explosive power of nuclear weapons. Most vented tritium will condense into water vapor which can then be readily ingested by living organisms, including humans. Fetuses are particularly at risk.

LANL’s nuclear weapons budget has doubled over the last decade to $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2021. But funding for so-called cleanup has remained flat at around $220 million, or 8% that of nuclear weapons. In fact, LANL plans to “cap and cover” some 200,000 cubic yards of radioactive and toxic wastes, leaving them permanently buried in unlined pits above our groundwater, some three miles uphill from the Rio Grande, and call it cleaned up. To add to this, the Lab now plans to vent tritium into the air.

The Flanged Waste Tritium Containers (FTWCs) were packaged at LANL’s Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility in 2007 and sent to the Area G waste dump for permanent disposal. However, during an audit of the containers officials identified lead in the materials inside the FTWCs, resulting in the containers being designated as hazardous waste requiring offsite disposal. Further analysis identified the “potential” for a flammable, pressurized mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in the headspace of the FTWCs, requiring venting to enable personnel to safely move the containers.

LANL’s side of the story is available on this page, including a copy of its Flanged Tritium Waste Containers Venting Presentation (PDF).
Some questions that we believe the Lab needs to answer are:

1) Why is it urgent to vent the FTWCs now? What is their explosive potential? What are the risks should an explosion occur? Why would the potential public health risks of venting tritium outweigh the risks of not venting?

2) Has the Lab prepared a rigorous analysis of alternatives to open venting of tritium? Or is it simply pursuing the cheapest way to get rid of excess tritium?

3) LANL is required to obtain a “temporary authorization” from the New Mexico Environment (NMED) to proceed with its tritium venting. Has the Lab given NMED a rigorous analysis of alternatives to open venting of tritium? If not, why should NMED grant the temporary authorization?

4) Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. Why not just let the tritium decay away to reduce the public health risk?

5) The Lab claims that tritium will be captured during venting. What solid documentation is there of that, and at what percentage, instead of general, unsubstantiated statements?

6) The Lab asserts that the tritium releases will be carefully monitored. How can the public trust LANL given its past history of serious noncompliance with the Clean Air Act’s requirements for monitoring radioactive air emissions?

Potential Health Effects of Tritium
The available literature on the potential health effects of tritium varies widely in their conclusions, sometimes in contradictory fashion. Not surprisingly the nuclear energy and weapons industries pretty much dismiss any serious public health impacts from tritium. In contrast, some independent scientists have warned that radioactive tritium can remain in the ova of female human fetuses after birth for life.

Read “Selected Literature on the Potential Health Effects of Tritium”

How to Access the Public Information Session
*Please indicate your intentions to speak when registering.
The public information session will be hosted via WebEx Events, a different platform than the first session in an effort to accommodate the overwhelming public interest in this matter. People who wish to attend can register here. The WebEx Event meeting password is vG9Rbr3m3f4. Those who do not have internet access may call in by phone at 415-655-0001, access code 173 622 0434. If joining by phone, the meeting password is 84972736.*- If you wish to speak at the information session, please indicate your desire to do so with your registration.

Those wishing to submit questions in advance of the presentation may send them to FTWC_publicinfo@lanl.gov.

Attendees should join the webinar 15 minutes early. This will allow time to install or download any needed software or applications and confirm that attendees are able to connect to both audio and video. All required software is free of charge to all participants. While WebEx software is intended to run on all commercial internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Safari), WebEx recommends using Chrome or Firefox internet browsers for the best experience. Tips for WebEx Events use can be found here.

Go to www.nukewatch.org for more information.

Thank you!
Jay Coghlan, Executive Director
Scott Kovac, Research Director
Sophie Stroud, Digital Content Manager and Youth Specialist

Please mail a check today to: Nuclear Watch New Mexico, 903 W. Alameda #325, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Please make check out to “SRIC”, our fiscal agent. You can also donate online using the button below. All donations are fully tax deductible. Please be as generous as you can.
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Disarmament Quotes

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

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U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

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Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

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