By Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico

Last fall, the international community rose up in defense of the Pacific Ocean. Seafood and salt purveyors, public policy professors, scientists and environmentalists, all lambasted Japan’s release of radioactive wastewater from the disastrously damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the sea.

At the heart of the contention was tritium, an element that, by mass, is 150,000 times more radioactive than the plutonium used in the cores of nuclear weapons. Odorless and colorless, tritium — the radioactive form of hydrogen — combines with oxygen to form water. Just one teaspoon is enough to contaminate 100 billion gallons more water up to the U.S. drinking water standard, according to Arjun Makhijani, an expert on nuclear fusion and author of the monograph, “Exploring Tritium Dangers.”

What didn’t make international headlines — but was quietly taking place on the other side of the world — was Los Alamos National Laboratory’s own plans to vent the same radioactive substance into northern New Mexico’s mountain air. Japan’s releases would take place over three decades. LANL’s would include up to three times more tritium — and take place in a matter of days.

There is no hard timeline for the release, but if the plans are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, LANL is looking at a period with “sufficiently warm weather,” a spokesperson from the National Nuclear Security Administration wrote by email. That could mean as soon as this summer.

Those controversial plans date back to 2016, when LANL discovered that a potentially explosive amount of hydrogen and oxygen was building up in four containers of tritium waste stored in a decades-old nuclear dump called Area G. The safest and most technically viable solution, the lab decided — and the best way to protect workers — would be to release the pressure and, with it, thousands of curies of tritium into the air.

When advocates caught wind of the venting in March 2020, Covid was in its earliest and most unnerving phase. Pueblo leaders, advocates and environmentalists wrote impassioned letters to the lab and the EPA, demanding that they change or, at the very least, postpone the release until after the pandemic. At the same time, Tewa Women United, a nonprofit founded by Indigenous women from northern New Mexico, issued its first online petition, focusing on tritium’s ability to cross the placental barrier and possibly harm pregnant women and their fetuses. Only after a maelstrom of opposition did the lab pause its plans and begin briefing local tribes and other concerned members of the community. 

“We see this as a generational health issue,” said Kayleigh Warren, Tewa Women United’s food and seed sovereignty coordinator. “Just like all the issues of radioactive exposure are generational health issues.”

Last fall, the lab again sought the EPA’s consent. A second petition from Tewa Women United followed. Eight months later, the federal agency’s decision is still pending.

The NNSA, which oversees the health of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile from within the Department of Energy, declined Searchlight New Mexico’s requests for an interview.

The crux of the issue comes down to what is and isn’t known about the state of the containers’ contents. Computer modeling suggests they are pressurized and flammable, but the actual explosive risk has not been measured, the lab has conceded.

Critics have requested that the contents be sampled first to determine whether there is any explosive risk and whether venting is even needed. The EPA says that sampling would require going through the same red tape as venting. The lab, for its part, plans to sample and vent the contents in one fell swoop.

But why, critics wonder, are these containers in this state in the first place? Were they knowingly over packed and left for years to grow into ticking time bombs?

“I do not like the position we’re in,” James Kenney, cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, told the Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee in 2020. The containers, he said, had been “neglected for so long by both DOE and the Environment Department” that NMED potentially faces a lose-lose situation: Vent the tritium drums and try to prevent the emissions from being released into the air or “run the risk of leaving those drums onsite knowing that they are pressurized and could rupture, meaning an uncontrolled amount of tritium would go out.”

Venting and vexing

State and federal documents paint a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma. The containers can’t be moved until the pressure is vented. But the movement itself may cause more pressure to build up, requiring a second, third or even fourth venting.

The drums were packed in 2007 and stored at Area G on the lab’s southeast side, for years marooned and dormant. In 2016, the explosive risk was discovered and the lab issued standing orders prohibiting workers and state and federal regulators from getting within 50 feet of the drums, except on a “case-by-case basis.”

The original plan was to vent the containers only once at Area G and then cart them across LANL’s campus to the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility, located along its northwestern edge, where they would further be processed. But soon, the lab realized that one venting wouldn’t be enough.

The movement out of Area G, the lab feared, would jostle the containers “replicating the potentially hazardous situation the venting is intended to alleviate,” a revamped application to the EPA read. That’s when LANL arrived at a new, if trickier, plan using a specialized mobile rig to partially vent these particularly vexing containers at various locations at Area G and then, if the pressure should build en route, at locations outside the tritium facility.

Copyright photos of this setup show what looks like a typical clothes dryer duct stretching across the pavement, connecting to a container on one end and an exhaust stack on the other. The lab estimates that a molecular sieve would capture between 20 to 90 percent of the tritium before it enters the air — a device considered the industry standard.

In a worst-case scenario, the containers could unleash up to 20 millirem of tritium to the public, the lab estimated — double its federal release limit of 10 millirem per year for all operations. But the use of the sieve, LANL contends, makes it more likely that fewer than six millirem will reach the public.

One might get slightly more radiation from a chest X-ray, the EPA offered as a comparison in an email to Searchlight. However, as all experts concur, not all radiation is the same. Some forms are more damaging than others: If or how radiation enters the body is an important consideration. Specifically, radiation is most harmful when ingested.

Here in New Mexico, the release would represent LANL’s highest overall emissions in nearly two decades. (Every year, the lab must tally the total emissions from the 28 “stacks” it uses to release contaminants from buildings, including the two that routinely emit tritium.) 

The lab has to make another crucial calculation — where a member of the public would be standing to potentially receive the highest radiation dose from the venting. According to the lab, this “maximally exposed individual” would be near a church in White Rock. There are at least three near the boundary of the lab and Technical Area 54, the location of Area G.

Local tribes would receive “less than one-tenth of the dose that would be received by the hypothetical maximally exposed individual (MEI) in White Rock,” the lab said in response to community concerns. Those limits, it concluded, “will therefore be protective of all population centers.”

Tritium 101 

Plutonium and uranium are familiar to most people, if by name only. But few know anything at all about tritium — a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is used to make watch dials and EXIT signs glow bright neon. Tritium’s other, lesser-known use is as a “boost gas,” which, when inserted into the hollow core of a plutonium pit, amplifies a nuclear weapon’s yield. Globally, hundreds of atmospheric weapons tests dispersed tritium into the atmosphere, steeping rain, sea, and groundwater with the element and, ultimately, lacing sediment worldwide.

Tritium is widely produced at nuclear reactors and is today tested, handled and routinely released at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Criticisms of this venting have always centered on two of the element’s key characteristics: First, it travels “tens to hundreds of miles,” according to lab documents. Second, when tritium is in the form of water, it becomes omnipresent and easy for bodies to absorb.

“Tritium is unique in this,” wrote Makhijani. “It makes water, the stuff of life, most of the mass of living beings, radioactive.”

Years of LANL reports depict tritium’s ubiquity in the lands and ecosystem within its bounds, a palimpsest of radioactive decay. This is measured in curies, a basic unit that counts the rate of decay second by second. 

The lab’s first environmental impact statement, published in 1979, estimated that it had buried close to 262,000 curies of tritium at Area G and released tens of thousands more into the air from various stacks over the decades. The lab had two major accidental releases of tritium around the same time — 22,000 curies in the summer of 1976 and nearly 31,000 curies in the fall of 1977.

Today, trees have taken it into their root systems on Area G’s southeast edge. Rodents scurrying in and out of waste shafts are riddled with the substance, owing to tritium vapors from years past. A barn owl ate those rodents and had 740 times more tritium concentration in its body than the U.S. drinking water standard, the common reference value for indicating tritium contamination. The lab’s honeybee colonies — kept to determine how radioactive contaminants are absorbed — produced tritiated honey up to 380 times more concentrated than the drinking water standard, reports show.

The EPA set the current standard for radioactive emissions at DOE facilities in 1989, but that didn’t stop the lab from releasing thousands of curies of tritium into the air shortly afterward. In 1991, the EPA issued a notice of non-compliance to the lab for not calculating how much of a radiation dose the public received. Another notice followed in 1992.

Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety filed a lawsuit two years later alleging that the DOE hadn’t properly monitored radioactive emissions, as required by the Clean Air Act. At the time, a former lab safety officer, Luke Bartlein, observed what he described in an affidavit as a “pattern and practice of deception at LANL with respect to the radionuclide air monitoring system.” It was routine for lab staffers and management to vent glove boxes and other materials contaminated with tritium outside so that the contamination would deliberately “not register” on the stack monitors, he recounted, leading to false emissions reports.

The lab settled in 1997; a consent decree followed and would stay in effect until 2003. The lab says it has maintained low annual emissions ever since.

Critics are wary though. “Is this a precedent-setting event?” Warren, of Tewa Women United, wondered about the proposed venting. After all, documents show that another container was vented at the tritium facility where this procedure is authorized, in April 2019, releasing a total of five curies, the lab confirmed.

At least 15 more containers with tritium waste appear to be in limbo there and at Area G, two of which are in line to be vented after this emission is completed. 

Radioactive secrets

For surrounding communities, the lab’s history of secret experiments has long politicized northern New Mexico’s air. In its earliest decades, the lab detonated radioactive lanthanum, a short-lived but strong source of radiation, in canyons near Pueblos and Nuevomexicano communities just miles downwind. 

Elder Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, one of Tewa Women United’s founders, can still remember hearing those detonations rumble in the canyons near her home in San Ildefonso Pueblo when she was a girl. Only decades later did documents disclose just how far those emissions had traveled outside of lab property, eastward across the Tewa Basin all the way to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and beyond.

“What if this was your place, the stream, the water, the mountains, the trees and everything that’s home, that was your survival,” Sanchez said. “And now it’s like, nope, it’s not viable for you anymore.”

Tewa Women United and others now worry that the region’s famously fitful winds will carry tritium, a consummate shapeshifter, to corners far beyond the lab’s bounds.

The movement will be invisible. First, tritium will transform moisture in the air. Then, that moisture will quickly contaminate other “open water surfaces and biota downwind, including food growing in the area and food in open-air markets, and humans themselves,” according to Ian Fairlie, a London-based radiation consultant for the European Parliament. 

A fraction of that tritium can linger in the body, if ingested. In pregnant women, tritium can then stage another imperceptible passage across the placental barrier, concentrating 60 percent more of the element in the fetus than in the mother, according to Makhijani. Radiation exposure can lead to early failed pregnancies and neurological damage in the first weeks of gestation.

While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has radiation exposure limits for pregnant women in the workplace, there are no specific radiation protections for pregnant women in the public — or their fetuses.

In 1999, Makhijani and more than 100 scientists, activists and physicians across the country and worldwide signed a letter to the National Academy of Sciences. Their ask? To evaluate how radionuclides that cross the placental boundary, including tritium, impact the fetus, a request Makhijani renewed in 2022.

As he put it, tritium — the “most ubiquitous pollutant from both nuclear power and nuclear weapons” — has largely escaped regulatory and scientific scrutiny when it comes to matters of pregnancy.

Cindy Folkers, the radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a national advocacy organization, believes the reason is rooted in the radiation establishment’s fear of liability. “You get layers and layers and layers and layers of denial.”

The scant research that does exist comes from pregnant women who survived atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1986, the International Commission on Radiation Protection concluded that exposing a fetus to ionizing radiation, the kind that tritium emits, has a “damaging effect…upon the development of the embryonic and fetal brain.” The area most at risk of harm, it went on, is the forebrain, which controls complex and fundamental functions like thinking and processing information, eating, sleeping and reproduction.

Ionizing radiation damages the cell in two ways. On the one hand, it breaks apart the building blocks from which humans are made, causing rifts in DNA. On the other, it fundamentally changes the chemistry of the cell, breaking apart its water molecules and upsetting its metabolism.

That’s what makes it different from, say, an X-ray, Folkers said. “A machine can be shut off,” but “a radioactive particle that’s inside your body will continue irradiating you.” For a pregnant woman, this adds up to “cumulative biological damage,” the kind that cuts across generations.

“We’re dealing with a life cycle,” Folkers said. “And females are an integral part of that life cycle. Not only are they more damaged by radioactivity, and their risks are higher for cancer, but they are also carrying in them the future generations. So when you’re dealing with a female baby who’s developing in the womb, you are dealing with that child’s children at the very least.”

In other words, a mother is like a Russian nesting doll. She holds a fetus and that fetus, if a female, holds all future eggs. Exposure to her is exposure to future generations.

This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.