Is Santa Fe's drinking water safe?

More than half of our water in Santa Fe comes from the Rio Grande, and it's drawn downstream from Los Alamos Canyon regularly dumps toxic stormwater into the river. The rest comes from a wellfield that recently tested positive for radioactive tritium.

Watch the lecture, and decide for yourself!

I got some very specific feedback from one LANL contractor who has a reputation for being an apologist for the lab, and I think the exchange is valuable so I've included it below. My comments are shown in blue.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

1.      “…draws water from directly beneath several canyons that regularly dump storm water laced with radionuclides and bomb-making contaminants.”   The Buckman diversion is located below only one major canyon---Los Alamos Canyon.  Storm water is infrequent in that channel.  Substantial flows (> 10-20 cfs) occur on the order of 5 to 10 days per year.

That is pure semantics:  the three canyons converge just prior to dumping into the river. Flows following the recent fire have been very large and full of highly toxic ash, which is why all those news stories were done about them. Since storm intensities are generally growing, this will likely continue to be a problem.

2.      “…below Los Alamos National Labs – host to more than 2,000 known toxic dumpsites?”  This is a 20-year old number that the Lab came up with during the early days of the Environmental Restoration Program.  It included known and rumored sites.  After they field-checked the locations, many sites were dropped off the list (always done with approval of EPA).  The current number is closer to 300, if my memory serves me.  The vast majority of the sites are located downstream of the Buckman Diversion point and are located many miles from the Rio Grande.   In actuality, most of the contaminants carried in Los Alamos Canyon are traceable to just a handful of old sites.

This calls for a celebration...there are only THREE HUNDRED toxic dump sites at LANL!  Anyway, my sources are standing behind the 2000 figure. I guess calling something a rumor doesn’t make it untrue.

3.      ….”the study concluded that there was “no risk” posed by drinking water from Buckman.” I reviewed the Preliminary Draft technical report and didn’t see this language.  It would be unfortunate if they did use that language.  In the document I reviewed, they were very careful to quantify risk rather than to attach qualitative labels.

The “no risk” language occurs in both the draft and final reports, in the executive summary and in the body, and in all the news articles following release of the reports. Unfortunate, indeed.

4.      ….”It’s one thing to practice engineering without a license, and it’s another to tell 100,000 uses of a water system that there is no health risk from drinking water taken from beneath a nuclear waste dump.”  The article seems to imply that a proper risk assessment could not be conducted unless a PE licensed in New Mexico performed the study.  Having been a part of many large risk assessment teams, my opinion is the most effective were those which were multi-disciplinary with toxicologists, health physicists, hydrologists, environmental analysts and engineers.  To suggest that only engineers are relevant is shortsighted.    Regarding engineers, the ChemRisk team included Ph.D. level engineers.  Also, the author seems to be unaware that a detailed independent review of the Buckman treatment system was performed by Kerry Howe, PH.D, P.E.---a University of New Mexico Environmental Engineering professor--- before ChemRisk efforts were launched.

This goes to the heart of my concern. Hydrologists did the hydrology, toxicologists did the toxicology, but where is the engineering? Having engineers on the team is not the same as doing engineering. Anyway, engineers ARE the only relevant ones FOR THE PART OF THE STUDY THAT REQUIRES ENGINEERING. If engineering was done, what is the MTBF (mean time before failure) of the sensing equipment components? Of the cellular relay transmitters? Of the alarm relays and pump relays? Did Dr. Kerry Howe calculate those, or did he also assume as everyone else did that the electro-mechanical systems would always work and that toxic storm-water would never be drawn into the system? I suspect the latter.

5.      …”ChemRisk bills itself as the “premier contractor in the U.S. for characterizing former nuclear weapons complex sites.”  In other words, they have carried out millions of dollars worth of work on behalf of LANL and other weapons complexes.”  My understanding is the ChemRisk’s work at LANL is done on behalf of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  CDC was asked by Congress to direct health assessments and dose reconstruction studies of the nuclear weapon sites to ensure the assessments were done independent of the Department of Energy.

Allow me to simplify: ChemRisk has a biggie-wiggie contract at the Lab, but the Buckman study was teenie-weenie. Would ChemRisk jeopardize the biggie-wiggie by saying something in the teenie weenie that pisses off the muckie-muckies? Not on your winkie-tinkie they wouldn't.

6.      “Just about anyone can tell you that after you remove contaminants, there is no risk of contamination.”  This really is the heart of the issue, which boils down to a sediment removal project.  If you remove the sediment, you remove the bulk of most of the contaminants, including those from LANL.  I am not aware of anything unique to “LANL contaminants” that make them more difficult to remove when compared to other contaminants in the environment. 

The point is that several trivializing assumptions were made, making the study useless as a risk analysis. First, the study assumed the water entering wouldn't be highly contaminated despite the fact that sometimes the river is highly contaminated. Then they assumed the not-very-contaminated water would be properly decontaminated before anyone drinks it. That is NOT a risk analysis! A risk analysis would be a study of the probability that the highly contaminated water enters the system and isn't properly decontaminated before it flows into the public water supply. You actually need a calculator and a brain to do a risk analysis, you can't just assume the risks don't exist and then conclude that you are correct.

7.      …”In other words, they analyzed the risk of contamination after the contaminants were removed.”  The Preliminary Draft Report does quantify risk from ingestion and swimming in the Rio Grande before treatment.

No, the report quantifies risk from ingestion and swimming in the river when the toxins aren’t flowing. There is also no risk in standing on a train track, unless a train is coming.

…”I haven’t carried out my own analysis of the risk of LANL contaminants getting into Santa Fe’s drinking water and making people sick, but my guess is that over the long run it’s somewhere around 100 percent.”  This is quite an assertion without any analysis. 

And quite an easy assertion to make once you understand probability theory. The more times you engage in risky behavior, the higher the odds of getting hurt. Repeat it indefinitely, and the odds rise to 100 percent. In the case of Buckman, we plan to pump water out of an increasingly polluted river every day for the next fifty years or so. Saying there is no risk in that is a lie that will, I fear, have tragic consequences.

Consuelo Bokum    bokatz@cybermason.com    505-982-4342
Chris Calvert    ccalvert@santafenm.gov    505-955-6812
Danny Mayfield        dmayfield@santafecounty.org    505-986-6200
Rosemary Romero    r2romero@santafenm.gov    505-690-3016
Liz Stefanics        lstefanics@co.santa-fe.nm.us    505-986-6210
Virginia Vigil        vvigil@co.santa-fe.nm.us    505-955-2755
Rebecca Wurzburger    rebeccawurzburger@gmail.com    505-955-6815

They will tell you that they commissioned a study to look at the risk to Santa Fe residents, and the study concluded that there was “no health risk” posed by drinking water from Buckman.

No health risk? None?

Here’s are a few things you should know about the risk analysis.

First, there is no such thing as a system with “no risk.” Everything has risk, and when it comes to engineered systems, history is rife with examples of engineers under-predicting risk. I pointed this out in a letter to the Santa Fe New Mexican last November, and surprisingly I got a call the next day from an investigator from the New Mexico Board of Registration for Professional Engineers. He reminded me that when I became licensed as an engineer in New Mexico, I agreed to abide by a Code of Professional Conduct that includes reporting substandard engineering practice that might effect public safety.

So last November, I filed a formal complaint against ChemRisk – the company that did the risk analysis. The investigator, Roman Garcia, told me that no ChemRisk employees could be found on the roles of licensed engineers in New Mexico.

It’s one thing to practice engineering without a license, and it’s another to tell 100,000 users of a water system that there is no health risk from drinking water taken from beneath a nuclear waste dump.

The results of ChemRisk’s report were released in draft form in October, 2010 after Santa Fe had already spent more than $200 million on the Buckman project. ChemRisk charged $200,000 for the analysis -- about one-tenth of one percent of the project cost. Seems like that might have been a good investment to make before the start of the project, rather than after it’s completion.

On it’s website, ChemRisk bills itself as the “premier contractor in the U.S for characterizing former nuclear weapons complex sites.” In other words, they have carried out millions of dollars worth of work on behalf of LANL and other weapons complexes. Are they willing to jeopardize those contracts in favor of a little $200,000 contract for Santa Fe? This is commonly known as an “inherent conflict of interest”.

ChemRisk’s integrity has been questioned before. In 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported that ChemRisk “reanalyzed” data from another scientist and published their work in a scientific journal, under the original scientist’s byline, reversing the conclusion that chromium contamination in drinking water leads to an increased risk of stomach cancer. ChemRisk didn’t mention that the work was paid for by PG&E, who was working at the time on the infamous Erin Brockovich case. PG&E paid $333 million to settle the Brokovich case, and the scientific journal retracted the article.

Did ChemRisk’s do anything unethical when they analyzed the Buckman data? In my opinion they did, but they may have gotten some help from the Buckman Board. Buried in ChemRisk's report is an assumption that four of the most dangerous contaminants known to wash into the Rio Grande above Buckman are removed before anyone drinks the water. In other words, they analyzed the risk of contamination after the contaminants were removed, allowing them to state that there is “no health risk”.

Just about anyone can tell you that after you remove contaminants, there is no risk of contamination. You don’t need to spend $200,000 to find that out.

An article published in the Santa Fe New Mexican last December claims that the decision to study the risk of contamination under the assumption that contaminants had been removed was made by the Buckman board of directors. That would be shocking if it turns out to be true. Perhaps we should ask them.

I haven’t carried out my own analysis of the risk of LANL contamination getting into Santa Fe’s drinking water and making people sick, but my guess is that over the long run it's somewhere around 100 percent. My reasoning is this: If you put one bullet in a six-shooter, spin the cylinder, point the barrel at your head and pull the trigger, the odds of killing yourself are just one in six. But it is a well established fact that if you repeat the game over and over again, day after day, you will surely kill yourself. It is a mathematical certainty.

As long as the Buckman pumps continue to run and the LANL toxins continue to flow, Santa Feans are playing a perpetual game of Russian Roulette with their drinking water. Unless LANL cleans their waste out of the canyons above Buckman, eventually our water supply will become toxic.

It is, sadly, a mathematical certainty.

The problem with setting a cap and creating a market for carbon is that there are too many loopholes, leaving too much room for the same shenanigans we’ve always seen from utilities. Utilities are loophole specialists. They are only fighting this fight out of instinct, and because they love it when their very, very highly paid lawyers can be reimbursed by ratepayers. ;o)  A colleague of mine affectionately calls this "paying for the stick they beat us with". Nice!

Here are some of the specific problems with a law mandating that utilities reduce carbon emissions:

Electric utilities...
...want to go nuclear anyway, and everyone seems to think that nukes are carbon-free.
...pass their costs on to ratepayers on everything they do, no matter how stupid.
...are prepared to game the carbon market, just like they game every market they are given.

There are many avenues for addressing the horror that is the electric utility industry, including...

...separating genco’s from disco’s/transco’s (no company can own both wires and generators).
...granting citizens a right-of-access for uploading energy to the grid (currently we can only download).
...applying feed-in tariffs that reward strategic implementation of distributed generation.
...mandating a fuel-to-wire efficiency standard that increases over time.

The last one (the efficiency standard) is interesting to me, and I’ve never heard it proposed. It’s easy to implement and track, and it would expose the insane inefficiency of the central generation model (the main reason utilities pollute so heavily). It would also yield immediate carbon reductions, and there is precedent (automobile fuel standards).

But the real solutions are so boring...I can hear the yawns out there already.

Think I’ll head back into my stupor now!  Much love, - Mark

Emergency workers trying to slow the melting of nuclear fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were forced to abandon their posts yesterday after another powerful earthquake triggered an evacuation order. The quake also knocked out grid-power to two nuclear plants in northern Japan, although cooling was maintained using backup power sources.

The evacuation of the Fukushima power plant came at a particularly precarious time, as newly released details highlighted the degree to which the situation there continues to worsen. Speculation mounted this week that at least part of the melting nuclear fuel inside reactor 2 had burned through its steel containment structure, and cooling passages are believed to be blocked in reactor 1, where pressures continue to rise alongside fears of another hydrogen explosion.

Yesterday’s quake, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, was the fifth major earthquake in the region over the past 30 days, and one of more than 1100 aftershocks since the March 11 disaster.

Data from U.S. Geological SurveyAll of this should call into question the sanity of building nuclear power plants in earthquake zones, where the loss of electric power needed to run cooling pumps quickly leads to disaster.

And California’s nuclear plants would be no match for the punch that Japan’s recent earthquakes are packing. A magnitude 7.1 earthquake like the one that struck yesterday releases 40 percent more energy than one measuring 7.0 – the level that California’s San Onofre Nuclear plant was built to withstand. Reactors at Diablo Canyon are rated to for a more powerful 7.5 quake, but three of the 241 quakes that struck Eastern Honshu on March 11 were stronger than that. With magnitudes of 7.7, 7.9, and 9.0, these three quakes respectively released 2-times, 4-times, and 180-times the energy that Diablo Canyon was built to survive.

Proponents of nuclear power can continue their little waggle dance as long as they like, but nuclear power is already doomed -- even before the current crisis is over. And unfortunately it's far from over, because in Japan, there's still a whole lotta shakin' goin' on.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help wondering whether Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) might be similarly understating what’s going on at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Japan’s major news outlet has been claiming that things aren’t as bad as Three Mile Island, and the “experts” trotted out here in the U.S. have been assuring us that things won’t get as bad as Chernobyl. But on day six of the tragedy, right on schedule, the lights and cameras came on, and the world let out a collective gasp.

Unlike Chernobyl, which involved a single, 3,200-megawatt reactor, the current crisis involves six reactors totaling 4,700 megawatts. TEPCO was quick to point out that only three of the six were running at the time of the earthquake, but wasn’t nearly as quick with the factoid that the fuel rods they had removed from the out-of-service reactors were still sitting inside their respective reactor buildings. Thanks to the geniuses at General Electric who designed the reactors at Fukushima, these active fuel rods were stored in pools of water located above the reactor, alongside many years-worth of spent fuel rods. In this location, nuclear material is far more vulnerable than when it sits inside the highly reinforced core of the reactor itself, or gets put out to pasture in a dry cask. (The NRC disagrees on this last point.)

To make matters worse, fuel rods in the storage pools create an explosion hazard as soon as active cooling of the pool ceases, which happened after the plant got hit by a twenty-four foot tsunami. Fuel rods, whether active or spent, are highly radioactive and produce enough heat to boil off the water in the pool. Once enough water boils off and the rods become exposed to air, they react to create highly explosive hydrogen gas. Four of the six reactor buildings at Fukushima have now exploded, and three of those explosions have been attributed to loss of water in the fuel storage pools.

For days we have been told that workers at the plant are working to keep the fuel-rod pools filled with water. This effort, we are told, is ongoing alongside efforts to continue pumping cooling water into the reactors themselves. But today, Reuters published this satellite photo of the four buildings that endured explosions:

Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactors 1-4, Reuters via DigitalGlobe
The reactor buildings are the four, cube-shaped structures in the center, with reactor four inside what’s left of the building on the far left, and reactor two is inside the building that looks intact except for the little plume of steam coming out the hole. Reactors five and six are located elsewhere on the site.

Perhaps my years of experience working as an engineer inside industrial facilities makes this seem obvious, but look at buildings three and four (the ones on the left) and ask yourself honestly whether there’s an intact swimming pool in there keeping all those old fuel rods submerged. Hard to imagine?

As far as pumping cooling water into highly pressurized reactors, can you imagine that there are intact plumbing lines still connected to the reactors inside any of these buildings? The reinforced concrete walls that have been blown to hell were eighteen inches thick, and the explosions were so powerful they were felt twenty-five miles away. Any chance the plumbing in there is anything but a mangled mess of crumpled steel? Highly doubtful, with the exception of building two, but they’ve already admitted that that building has a breached reactor that doesn’t hold water anymore.

There’s now so much radiation leaking that it’s no longer safe to approach any of these buildings, so efforts have been reduced to shooting water cannons at the scrap heaps, hoping to hit something hot. And there’s plenty of hot stuff in there:  Robert Alvarez from the Institute for Policy Studies reports that a single fuel-storage pool typically contains 20 to 50 million curies of Cesium-137 – perhaps the most dangerous isotope in this situation. We don’t know the total amount of Cesium-137 at risk at Fukushima, but with six storage pools and three reactors in play, it’s safe to assume it is many, many times the 6 million Curies that were inside the Chernobyl reactor when it exploded.

The workers who have stayed behind to try to avert total meltdowns are true heroes, just like the eleven who stayed on the drilling floor trying to bring a wild oil-well under control in the Gulf of Mexico. And like their brave counterparts from the oil industry, they will likely pay with their lives. A little honesty from TEPCO at this point would go a long way toward honoring their sacrifice.

If you’d like to call the studio with a question or comment, call 277-KUNM or toll-free 1-877-899-5866.

Thanks in advance for your support!

New Mexico:

The New Mexico Gas Company reported yesterday that 32,000 customers statewide were without natural gas – less than the 40,000 number that was floated briefly when I was writing my article last night. Note that the company shut off the service to thoese areas in response to low pressure in their pipelines. Not sure how they selected who should be shut off...it would be interesting to know! Restarting will be tedious, because they have to visit each affected home or business twice – first to shut off the main gas valve, then they return to open the valve, purge the system and relight pilots.

Their website shows the following specific service disruptions in New Mexico:

Santa Clara Pueblo (all)

Okway Owingeh Pueblo (all)

San Ildefonso Pueblo (portion)

Santa Ana Pueblo (portion)

Espanola (2,600 customers)

Bernalillo and Placitas (5,000 customers)

Taos, Questa, Red River (10,800 customers)

Coronado Village Mobile Home Park (200)

Silver City (750)

Tularosa, La Luz, Alamagordo (2,500)

Other news sources are reporting the following:

Arizona

Tucson – 14,000 customers without gas, and no word on when it will be restored. See here.

Texas

El Paso Pipeline Company appears to be the biggest player in the crisis, as they own and operate 42,000 miles of pipeline in the U.S. (more than any other company). Their lines leaving west Texas are the primary supply avenues for New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California. They are not stating what their problem was, but this morning they declared force majeure on their pipelines. A number of articles suggest that rolling blackouts in Texas disrupted processing plants or compressor stations, and that the bitter cold caused a number of wellheads to freeze. Frozen wellheads are responsible for cutting U.S. daily production from 62 Bcf (billion cubic feet) to 57.5 Bcf (more than 7 percent) according to Bentek.

California

San Diego – After experiencing pressure drops in its pipelines, SDG&E cut off 88 of its largest customers who had interruptible rates – discounts offered in exchange for an agreement to shut down in just this sort of emergency. An article just out says that SDG&E’s problem was contractual:  it tried to purchase enough gas on the spot market to serve its customers, but they couldn’t because they kept getting outbid by companies elsewhere.

If you have additional information you would like to post, please use the "comments" feature...thanks!



Ironically, as customers without gas service turn to electric heaters, the demand for natural gas could actually rise further as the spike in electrical demand triggers utility gas-turbine generators to start up. When that happens, gas is essentially still being used for heating, but via a far less efficient process – one that first turns the gas into electricity and sends it down the wires before customers turn the gas-generated electricity back into heat.

There are still many questions as events continues unfolding, but the question that should be on everyone’s mind is this one:  Will this crisis awaken us to the vulnerability of relying on big, central networks like the gas pipelines and the electric grid, and prompt us to develop local self-reliance in energy?

Sadly, I have reason to doubt that it will.

First of all, the natural gas crisis we faced ten years ago was worse than our current crisis, and it certainly didn’t prompt any movement toward self-reliance. At that time the production of natural gas in our most prolific basins was declining fast – so fast that we were unable to drill new wells fast enough to make up for the declines in existing wells. Essentially we were running on a treadmill, unable to run fast enough to keep the nation’s storage tanks filled. When energy traders realized the tanks were just days away from empty, they began bidding up the price of gas, sending heating bills soaring to record levels. But then a miracle occurred:  Spring arrived. Natural gas demand collapsed, and everyone forgot all about the crisis. (Well, almost everyone – the nonprofit Local Energy was born out of the seven months of research that I and my colleagues undertook following the event.)

This time around, thanks to an advance in gas production called hydraulic fracturing and an abysmal economy, it doesn’t appear that we ran short of gas. Nope, this time it wasn’t anything nearly as serious as depletion of a major energy resource. The problem was simply that our pipelines weren’t up to matching the power of a storm measuring two-thousand miles across and dropping temperatures as much as 30 degrees below normal over much of the country. The sudden demand for heating fuel could have been met with the gas in storage had there been sufficient pipeline capacity to deliver the gas quickly enough. Delivery was further frustrated, according to reports, by problems at gas-compressor stations that may have been a result of rolling electrical blackouts – another consequence of the high heating demand created by the storm.

My guess is that the discussion of energy self-reliance is still nowhere near the table. More likely, our new governor and her experts will advocate that we avoid further crises by accelerating investments in our gas pipelines and electric transmission lines. But every dollar we spend on these highly centralized networks increases our dependence on them, and diverts valuable resources away from the effort we must undertake:  building the decentralized, public, democratically controlled networks that will provide energy for our future.

Mustering the courage and the will to build decentralized public networks will never come from news reports, cost/benefit studies or climate regulations – it can only come from the understanding that without such systems, we are sunk. As the old saying goes, if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up where you’re headed.

It’s high time we changed our course.

Local Energy hired economist Shuman back in 2004 to estimate the impact on the local economy of heating fuel purchases in Santa Fe County. At that time, Shuman estimated that more than 85-cents of every dollar Santa Feans were paying on their natural gas bills was leaving Santa Fe. You could almost hear Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound.”

The other 15-cents – the part that was staying in town – was going in large part to the meter readers. Now, I don’t relish the inefficiency of trucks driving around Santa Fe carrying  technicians from house to house to jot down meter readings, but at least it was providing a few local jobs. According to a July article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the New Mexico Gas Company is hoping that automating the meters will enable them to replace 75 meter readers with five data collectors in the region stretching from Santa Fe to Belen. The sucking sound just gets louder.

The antidote, of course, is relocalization. Local Energy’s biomass district energy study, released in 2006, showed that downtown Santa Fe could easily be heated using local fuels, and that doing so would create enormous economic benefits. In addition to stimulating our local economy by keeping more heating dollars recirculating locally, installing a city-wide heating system that utilizes local fuels would create jobs, radically cut the city’s carbon emissions, and pay for much needed restoration of the forests surrounding Santa Fe.

Furthermore, if the city ever wakes up and realizes it needs to create a municipal electric utility, having a district heating system would enable huge efficiency gains because the waste heat from electrical generators, as well as from other sources, could be used to heat the city.

With such clear benefits available, why isn’t Santa Fe switching from dirty, carbon-based energy systems that suck money out of the community to clean one’s that don’t?

Got a thought on that?  Hit the “comment” button below, and receive bonus points if you can say it in one word!