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Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Accident
and Los Alamos National Laboratory Fire
The results are in and it's not looking good for the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a report, rating the station as one of the worst in the nation, in terms of the plant's safety systems.The plant is one "column" away from shutting down entirely. The NRC rates plants based on what they call "columns," one being the best and five being the worst. Based on the NRC's latest findings, Fort Calhoun is a "column four." This means, Fort Calhoun requires the NRC's highest level of attention, which includes more inspections. The NRC claims the plant needs improvement in two areas, one having to do with an electrical contractor that failed and the other with flooding. Despite the NRC's findings, Dave Bannister, the Chief Nuclear Officer for Omaha Public Power District, says all is good. Bannister says they have fixed those problems. Bannister says the NRC would have seen that they had made all the necessary fixes, if they had been able to come out for their June inspection. Flooding caused them to postpone. The NRC agrees, Fort Calhoun is operating safely. However, the station will need to work with NRC officials to prove that Fort Calhoun has fixed everything to get their column rating up. Fort Calhoun was closed prior to the release of these finding. It will reopen once NRC inspectors come out and decide that it can be. That meeting has not been rescheduled.
A longtime nuclear whistleblower, as well as a new report from the nuclear watchdog agency, have shed light on some startling flaws at The Watts Bar Nuclear plant in Spring City, Tennessee. The NRC report highlighted over 24 vulnerabilities after assessing the nations nuclear power plants after the Japanese earthquake and subsequent full scale nuclear disaster. Ann Harris, a former Watts Bar employee and long time whistleblower, was interviewed during a CBS investigation. In the interview she revealed startling information that the nuclear industry, as well as certain officials in the NRC, do not want you to hear. “Basically the books are being cooked, people are saying things they are not doing, that they swear under oath they have been done and they just aren’t done.”
According to CBS, the report included these vulnerabilities:
– a lack of emergency responder training
– faulty control panels
– malfunctioning communications equipment
– and issues with portable backup diesel generator
Unfortunately these are very similar to the problems that led to 3 full scale meltdowns after the massive earthquake that rocked Japan. As a nuclear whistleblower for over 15 years who has won a record 6 lawsuits against Watts Bar, Harris has seen her fair share of threats and what she described seemed to be attempted murder. “They ran me off the road, they wired my car for fireboming, they dropped the universal joint off my car”
Officials at the nuclear power plant in question have claimed that these reports are inaccurate and that Watts Bar is safe. To many, reassurance from the nuclear industry falls on deaf ears considering the fact that almost every single radiation release on the planet has been covered up to a certain extent. How can we trust an industry that is being accused by a prominent, credible whistleblower of intimidation and possible attempted murder? The NRC and the nuclear industry are riddled with corruptionon par or above the oil cartels. Even though the NRC recently released a report that was critical of Watts Bar, history shows that most likely the problem will be ignored and moved out of sight and out of mind. As the nuclear gamble continues, the people of the world must continue to expose the dangers of nuclear power plant flaws in the hopes that they may be fixed before another big one hits.
What in the world is really going on at Los Alamos, Ft. Calhoun and Fukushima? There are millions of Americans that would like the truth about what is happening at these nuclear facilities, but the mainstream media has been strangely quiet. Sadly, you really have to dig to find anything about the problems that are currently happening at nuclear facilities in the United States, and the mainstream media seems to have gotten really tired of talking about Fukushima. It is almost as if the mainstream media actually prefers to talk about mindless topics rather than focus on the truly important events that are happening all around us.
The relentlessly rising Missouri River is testing the flood worthiness of this nuclear power plant like never before. The now-idle plant has become an island. And unlike other plants in the past, Fort Calhoun faces months of flooding. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission insists that there is nothing to worry about, but it is also being reported that flood waters are literally “at the door” of the primary buildings. It is a very, very serious situation. The American people deserve to be told about what is happening.
The Army Corps predicts that the river will eventually rise high enough to flow over some 18 to 70 levees, mostly in rural areas of southeast Nebraska, southwest Iowa and Missouri. Other levees will become saturated, and water can erode their foundations, seep underneath or find other flaws to exploit. Even stronger urban floodwalls and levees can falter against the destructive force of floodwaters. As a precaution, officials in Omaha and across the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa, have developed plans to evacuate roughly 40,000 people from areas near the river in case a levee fails
The government is telling us not to panic. All is under control, just like in Japan. But here are a few troubling inconsistencies. One, the Red Cross shelter next to the Fort Calhoun plant has been closed. They claim it was due to “decreased need.” During a flood? Now there is a no-fly zone around the plant. Then there is the disturbing news that the spent fuel rod pool was so full that they store the surplus fuel rods in a dry storage area outside the safety of the pool. How long will that area stay dry and what happens if it gets wet? One reporter claims the dry storage bunker is now half-submerged. One of the intake structures is prone to flooding that could affect the water pumps. Non-functional water pumps? Does that sound familiar? Sadly, most Americans don’t know anything about Ft. Calhoun because the mainstream media has been largely ignoring this story. The NRC admits it routinely does not share reports from nuke industry with public—Including info about radiation leaks.
Nuclear energy is the deadliest, costliest form of energy on record; on average, there has been one nuclear accident resulting in at least $330 million in damage every year for the past 30 years.Nuclear power plants provide about 40 years of electricity while producing radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years.Despite this reality, the NRC is currently developing plans for safe storage of nuclear waste up to only 300 years.
Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Don't Want You to Know
The meltdown of a 500-megawatt reactor located 30 miles from a city would cause the immediate death of an estimated 45,000 people, injure roughly another 70,000, and cause $17 billion in property damage. That’s what we have at Ft Calhoun — a 500 MW reactor 20 miles north of Omaha.
Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Accident
Tens of millions of acres in the US corn belt have flooded, which will spike the cost of gas and food over the next several months. Worse, several nuclear power plants sit in the flooded plains. Both nuclear plants in Nebraska are partly submerged and the FAA has issued a no-fly order over both of them. The situation in Nebraska has developed amid heightened fears about nuclear safety following the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. On June 6, 2011, the Fort Calhoun pressurized water nuclear reactor 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska, which has been shut down since early April for refueling, suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools and entered emergency status due to imminent flooding from the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area. A day later, there was an electrical fire requiring plant evacuation. The official story is that the fire was in an electrical switchgear room at the plant. The facility lost power to a pump that cools the spent fuel pool for approximately 90 minutes. Then, on June 8th, NRC event reports confirmed the fire resulted in the loss of cooling for the reactor’s spent fuel pool.
A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.
Operating since 1973, Ft Calhoun filled its spent fuel cooling pool to capacity in 2006. The structure is 40 feet deep and 38 feet above ground. The plant serves as the storage site for 20 years worth of spent fuel rods from plants in the state in addition to one third of the rods that were removed during a recent refueling. In 2006, the site began storing spent fuel rods above ground in mausoleum-like concrete structures outside the nuclear plant.
Omaha Public Power says the spent fuels rods will be stored on-site forever. In 2009, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant was considered an alternative fuel rod storage site to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. In 2010, Congress failed to fund Yucca Mountain after more than $9 billion was squandered building concrete tunnels and chambers designed to keep waste safe for at least a million years.
The Aqua Dam, a 2,000 ft water-filled protective berm holding back floodwaters from a Nebraska nuclear power plant collapsed early June 26, after it was accidentally torn by a piece of heavy equipment while work was being performed at the site. This resulted in many fuel containers being washed out to the river. The fuel/oil containers were staged around the facility to supply fuel for pumps which remove water within the flood containment barriers. The breach allowed Missouri River flood waters to reach containment buildings and transformers and forcing the shutdown of electrical power. Backup generators are cooling the nuclear material at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station. Two days earlier, June 24, Kansas State University reported an emergency when radiation leaked at 149 times the Derived Air Concentration (DAC) limit for Iodine during a trial run of its reactor. Six-and-a-half hours after the Ft Calhoun water berm collapsed, operators reported it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, registering it as a “non-emergency.” The NRC says there’s nothing to worry about. The flooding has “had no impact on the reactor shutdown cooling or the spent fuel pool cooling.”
June 27, river water surrounded the main reactor building, mechanical building, spent fuel pool building and other structures. Barriers at the entrances to the buildings were attempting to keep that water from entering. The water berm, which is clearly part of Ft Calhoun’s flood response plan, along with sandbags and a mound of earth piled around the plant. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen says that “sandbags and nuclear power plants should not be in the same sentence.”
Arnie Gundersen on June 28, 2011 stated that the intake structure probably the most vulnerable, not auxiliary and containment buildings.The intake structure draws in river water that cools reactor and spent fuel pool. It is critical that it stays dry.If gets water in it and emergency service water pumps fail then you’ve got a case where you’re going to cause fuel damage. It is probably the most vulnerable at Ft Calhoun.
Even when in shutdown mode, a nuclear plant requires electricity to keep key components cool in order to avoid any degradation or melting of the core that could result in the release of radiation. When there is a shutdown and refueling, only one-third of the fuel rods are removed; two-thirds of the fuel rods are still in the reactor and require cooling. Fort Calhoun is the smallest nuke plant in the nation, with one pressurized water reactor generating less than 500 MW. The NRC relicensed the plant thru 2033, giving it a lifespan of 60 years. The Cooper plant, also on the flooded Missouri river, was first commissioned in 1974 and has been relicensed thru 2034, also giving it a 60-year lifespan.
Since June 7, Cooper has been running under “Abnormal Operating Procedures” when river depth topped 38.5 feet (895 feet MSL), flooding the north access road. Sandbags and extra diesel fuel were brought in. As of 1:15 pm ET on June 16, the river height of just over 40 feet near Cooper was still 5 feet below the elevation required for a plant shutdown. In 1993, the Cooper Nuclear Station was critically flooded, prompting an emergency shut down. The Cooper plant is currently running at full power...
All nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.
“negligible release of nuclear gasses” related to this accident it warns that by the Obama regime's censoring of this event for “political purposes” it risks a “serious blow-back” from the American public should they gain knowledge of this being hidden from them.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chief, Gregory B. Jaczko, blasted the Obama regime just days before the near-meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant by declaring that “the policy of not enforcing most fire code violations at dozens of nuclear plants is “unacceptable” and has tied the hands of NRC inspectors.”
Although the Fort Calhoun plant was surrounded by an eight foot tall and 16 foot wide protective berm, several feet of water have now made its way to several areas of the Fort Calhoun plant. An 8-month-old NRC letter stated: Once flooding reached 1,004 feet, water would have entered the plant and the ability of emergency workers to move around the site would “significantly degrade.”At 1,010 ft water would enter Ft. Calhoun’s auxiliary building, shorting power and submerging pumps; they could then have a station blackout with core damage within 15-18 hours. The Army Corps of Engineers has been releasing water from upstream dams after heavy rain and snow melt. Water releases at the Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota hit 160,000 cubic feet of water per second, and the corps plans to continue releasing water at that rate until at least August.
A sobering warning about the immense danger of a chain reaction collapse of six earth filled dams along the flood swollen Missouri River. At 2321 miles long, this is the largest river in the United States and at more than 3 miles long, and 250' high, the Ft.Peck dam is the largest earthen dam in the world. It holds back Ft. Peck Lake which is 123 miles long, has 1,520 miles of shoreline, and holds back enough water to equal the entire annual flow of the Missouri River!
With record high snow-melt in the Rockies, reservoirs filled to capacity and water levels anticipated to not start receding until well into August, the Army Corps of Engineers is in uncharted territory as they attempt to strategically release water from these dams without causing a collapse.(This is the same Corps of Engineers responsible for levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans which resulted in the City being flooded and people better pay attention or cities like Omaha and St. Louis could be chest deep in water.)
If the Ft. Peck dam fails it would probably wreck every bridge, highway, pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites, and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly.The Ft. Peck dam is America's largest hydraulic filled earthen dam. Such dams are prone to "liquefaction" meaning they can become water logged and disintegrate if exposed to enough pressure or seismic activity. For that reason, California replaced most of its earthen hydraulic filled dams.Directly in the line of fire of this possible inland tsunami, 20 miles upstream from Omaha Nebraska on the Missouri River, the shut down Ft. Calhoun nuclear power plant that could become the next Fukoshima if a chain reaction dam collapse occurs.
If Calhoun melts down the contamination will be catastrophic, estimated by some to potentially be as much as 20 Fukushimas due to all the fuel rods being stored there. Smart. But this time there’s no ocean to cross. And What’s Downwind? According to today’s jet stream report, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and right on through the New York megalopolis and all of New England…with the gulf stream drawing it down the eastern seaboard all the way through Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. That will include direct hits on the heavily populated metro areas of St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York and DC. And we also know that the gulf stream moves around–naturally, and unnaturally thanks to HAARP weather manipulation technology. And then downstream? The contaminated flood waters would devastate everything in its path, including all the states, fisheries and farmland along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and on into the Gulf of Mexico. On top of this, this is America’s breadbasket getting flooded, tornadoed and nuked. The repercussions or inestimable. And unfortunately this where most people are going to file all this…beyond belief, much like the Gulf disaster, the major earthquakes and tsunamis, and Fukushima. As long as the media don’t let their guard down and react with genuine concern or outrage, most of the populace will think everything’s OK.
Dam breach scenarios involve extremely high flows — much higher than we're experiencing now. Six dams constituting one of the nation's largest reservoir systems sit above Fort Calhoun and Cooper Nuclear Stations. The corps is sending record runoff through the dams, and the consequences for Missouri River communities include broken levees, inundated homes and businesses, submerged highways and threatened power plants. The Gavins Point Dam is cracking and it appears they are going to blow part of it to relieve the pressure as charges have been set this past week. Right now, the dam is taking on more water then it can safely release. The water level at Ft. Calhoun nuclear plant reached a height of nearly 1,007 feet above sea level at the plant June 24, 11.
In 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited the Fort Calhoun plant for not being adequately prepared for floods and rated the safety violation in the “yellow” category, the second most serious. After initially contesting the findings, the plant’s operators, Omaha Public Power District, said that the problems had been resolved.
The federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded-out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to BUY THEIR LAND.They are intentionally flood massive acreage of highly productive farmground.Destroy people's communities and homes. Catch them while they are desperate and afraid and then swoop in and buy the ground cheap.
George Soros appears to be "investing" in farmground through the same puppet company that he used to get into the grain elevator and fertilizer business. The company is called Ospraie Capital Management and is buying up farmground in a joint venture with Teays River Investments as a partner. Ospraie was a hedge fund specializing in commodities that was started and run by some cocky child who didn't know how to trade bear markets and got his butt kicked into next week in the grain market of 2008. He also lost a fortune trying to trade RARE EARTH METALS. In fact, it was so bad that he had to shut his fund down because he had promised his investors that he would give them all of their investment money back if the fund lost more than 30% in one year. Whoopsie. But it appears that Soros swooped in and saved the day because this Ospraie is the "co-investor" with Soros that bought the remnants of ConAgra's trading operation and renamed it . . . Gavilon. In the industry, it is widely acknowledged that Ospraie IS Soros.
Gavilon just recently bought both DeBruce Grain out of Kansas City and the biggest grain elevator company in the Pacific Northwest, thus making Soros (who is the money behind Gavilon through both his own Soros Fund Management AND his de facto control of Ospraie) the third-largest grain company in the U.S. with 280 million bushels of storage capacity, behind only Archer Daniels Midland (542 million bushels storage capacity) and Cargill (344 million bushels storage capacity). Bottom line: Soros, through Ospraie, is buying up farmground.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Now monsoon rains threaten to flood whole communities with contaminants such as plutonium, uranium and mercury. The soil in the canyons above Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) contains materials with trace amounts of radiation. There is a frantic community effort under way with mainly Native Americans sandbagging their own homelands. Crews at Los Alamos National Laboratory installed barriers to divert water and removing contaminated soil from nearby canyons out of a concern that flash flooding could wash toxins into the Rio Grande that supplies drinking water for Santa Fe and many other communities. “This is our highest priority right now,” said Kevin Smith, manager of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos Site Office. “We had employees work through the weekend. The lab has been investigating and cleaning up Cold War-era waste sites; about 800 remain. Test results show Plutonium-239, Americium-241 and Cesium-137 levels are in the air around Los Alamos.
New Mexico Environment Department's DOE Oversight Bureau chief Thomas Skibitski] said the department will be looking for radionuclides related to energy and weapons research, as well as industrial-type contaminants. He said contaminants, such as those from atmospheric weapons testing that occurred 50-60 years ago, may get “remobilized and redistributed downstream”
Raging wildfires in New Mexico forced the evacuation of the famed nuclear lab at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was built, June 27, though officials insist that radioactive material is secure. The World War II Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bomb, and workers from the era dumped hazardous and radioactive waste in trenches along six acres atop the mesa where the town sits. Authorities at Los Alamos continue to insist that there is nothing to be concerned about. But that is also what they said about Fukushima at first.
At LANL there are at least 21 million cubic feet of toxic, chemical and radioactive waste buried in unlined pits, trenches, and shafts, on mesa tops, and in the canyons, inside the lab property. During the 2011 Las Conchas Fire, the LANL Director informed the media that large amounts of LANL wastes are buried in unknown locations outside LANL property. Those pits inside and outside LANL are not lined. All that waste is moving towards our groundwater, and that’s why groundwater monitoring is so very important, but their monitoring methods are hiding the detection of contamination. A report produced by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability found: Approximately 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes onsite were disposed of since 1943. All of the radioactive waste and most of the chemical waste have been buried on the mesas of Pajarito Plateau where LANL is located. Tons of plutonium were processed at LANL in the early years of development and again in the 1980s. After the Savannah River Site, LANL contains the second largest volume of plutonium-238 in the US nuclear weapons complex: this type of plutonium has a 90-year half-life, a very high activity and is extremely hazardous.
Radioactive liquid wastes were discharged to the canyons, initially with little treatment.
For many years, one method of disposal was “kick-and-roll.” The back of a truck was brought to the edge of a hole and barrels of waste were kicked. Wherever the barrels rolled to as their final resting place.
No protection was put in place to ensure contaminants did not spread from the barrel. It is not clear that today’s practices are more protective. An estimated 899,000 curies of low-level transuranic [radioactive elements heavier than uranium, such as plutonium] wastes were buried at Los Alamos. It is difficult to estimate exactly the quantity of radionuclides buried onsite due to the inaccurate record keeping and alterations in the definitions of low-elevel waste in the intervening years. Disposal continues today in unlined pits and shafts, a practice declared illegal by the New Mexico Attorney General’s office in 2011.
The head of the resource protection division, which contained the hazardous waste bureau, at the New Mexico Environment Department has resigned. The bureau is responsible for oversight and technical guidance related to the generation of hazardous waste as well as its storage and disposal. This includes work at Sandia and Los Alamos laboratories and the federal government’s nuclear waste repository in southeastern New Mexico.
The Las Conchas Fire has grown to at least 150,000 acres and is 57 percent contained. The speed at which the Los Alamos fire grew stunned fire officials. There are a lot of people who were just shocked and stunned at this number,” said Santa Fe National Forest spokesman Lawrence Lujan. “This fire is going to be with us for a while. It has the potential to double and triple in size,” Los Alamos Fire Chief Doug Tucker said on June 27. At 5:24 p.m. ET: The fire has crossed onto lab property and jumped across State Route 4, New Mexico fire officials say. A one-acre spot fire was reported in Water Canyon, within Technical Area 49, on the lab’s southwestern boundary. Chief Tucker said he feared the so-called Las Conchas Fire, whipped by high, rapidly shifting winds, could soon double or triple in size.
Some 12-thousand residents have rushed out of town, not only fearing for their homes but also that their future children would be born with deformities. Along with what’s actually on lab property, there is concern about what’s in the canyons that surround the sprawling complex. Nuclear tests were performed in the canyons dating back to the 1940s; so-called “legacy contaminations.” “The trees have grown up during that timeframe, and the soil can also be contaminated. If they get heated and that stuff goes air borne, then we are concerned.”
John Witham, a spokesman for the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said it is the only place in the country that produces plutonium pits that are carried in the core of nuclear bombs. Three metric tons of highly radioactive weapons-grade plutonium is stored in concrete and steel vaults in the basement floor of a building near the center of the complex, with an air-containment system surrounding it, Witham said. So in light of all of this information, don’t you think that the mainstream media should be keeping us better informed about what is really going on out there?
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety said the fire appeared to be about 3½ miles from a dumpsite where as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste were stored in fabric tents above ground in a section of the complex known as Area G. The group said the drums contain cleanup from Cold War-era waste that the lab sends away in weekly shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, a low-level radiation dump site in southern New Mexico.
“It contains approximately 30,000 barrels of nuclear waste,” former top security official Glen Walp said. “It’s not contained within a concrete, brick and mortar-type building, but rather in a sort of fabric-type building that a fire could easily consume. “Potential is high for a major calamity if the fire would reach these areas,” he added. Residents downwind are worried about the potential of a radioactive smoke plume if the flames reach thousands of barrels of waste stored in above-ground tents. “If it gets to this contamination, it’s over—not just for Los Alamos, but for Santa Fe and all of us in between,” said Mai Ting, a resident who lives in the valley below the desert mesas that are home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug Tucker said his department had the capacity to blanket the barrels with fire-retarding foam if a fire somehow sprang up at the storage site, which is paved and free of combustible materials. “The concern is that these drums will get so hot that they’ll burst. That would put this toxic material into the plume. It’s a concern for everybody.”
Greg Mello, Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, said "Well, Los Alamos National Laboratory is the—in funding terms, it’s the main nuclear warhead facility of the United States.There is a lot of plutonium there. There’s tritium—actually, tritium very close to the fire, about half a mile from the fire. Part of the problem is there’s an information deficit, and there’s a serious trust deficit. You can’t really take anything that the laboratory says at face value. It’s kind of a minimum—you know, they’d be the last to tell you if there was a serious problem. So you have to piece it together from other information. And that’s—Los Alamos Lab is becoming the center of plutonium manufacture for the country." The New Mexico Environment Department is monitoring the air for radioactive particles and tritium using low-volume air pumps.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is indelibly etched in historical memory as the hatching site of the Manhattan Project, the effort which created the first atomic bomb. The world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenal is still located there. The fear of course is that a natural disaster can morph into a nuclear one. Firefighters are therefore concentrating on keeping the blaze out of the laboratory. The facility called in special teams to track readings from a network of 60 monitoring stations that measure levels of substances such as plutonium and uranium in the air “as a precaution,” said lab director Charles McMillan. U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico said “there’s no doubt the lab stores a variety of hazardous and radioactive materials that you don’t want to escape in the atmosphere.”
