Hoping for the best
Posted by
JAC on 6/28/2011, 11:22 am
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43558540/ns/weather/
Firefighters struggled early Tuesday to hold back a fierce blaze roaring out of control at the edge of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a sprawling nuclear weapons complex that includes a plutonium facility.
Flames licked all day at the boundary of the laboratory site, home to the nation's largest supply of nuclear weapons, as fire crews scurried to douse spot fires carried onto the grounds by winds from the leading edge of the blaze.
The laboratory was shut down, and the adjacent town of Los Alamos, home to about 12,000 people, was placed under a mandatory evacuation earlier.
High winds on Monday forced the grounding of water-dropping helicopters and airplane tankers, limiting fire defenses largely to the use of bulldozers and hand tools. The facility cut natural gas to some areas as a precaution.
However, 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.
The anti-nuclear watchdog group Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety said the fire appeared to be about 3.5 miles from a dumpsite where as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste were stored in fabric tents above ground.
The group said the drums were awaiting transport to a low-level radiation dump site in southern New Mexico.
Lab spokesman Steve Sandoval declined to confirm that there were any such drums currently on the property. He acknowledged that low-level waste is at times put in drums and regularly taken from the lab to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in Carlsbad.
Sandoval said the fire was "quite a bit away" from that storage area. But he could not say what would happen if drums containing such waste were to burn. |
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In this thread:
Fire at Los Alamos National Lab -
JAC,
6/28/2011, 6:39 am- Evacuation order for city - JAC, 7/1/2011, 7:45 am
- 12K people rushed out of town fearing mutant offspring - JAC, 6/30/2011, 10:59 am
- Crews Make Progress On Fire Near Los Alamos - JAC, 6/30/2011, 6:26 am
- The Taxpayer Shouldn't be Burned Again in LANL's Inadequate Fire Protection Program - ArgosyTn, 6/29/2011, 1:17 pm
- Fire Chief thinking 100K acres - JAC, 6/29/2011, 12:28 pm
- Potential is high for a major calamity - JAC, 6/29/2011, 10:58 am
- CIMSS: Record Heat and Los Alamos Fire - JAC, 6/29/2011, 8:21 am
- Fire has potential to double or triple in size - JAC, 6/29/2011, 5:52 am
- NASA overflight shows wildfire spreading to north and east in the direction of Los Alamos - JAC, 6/28/2011, 12:15 pm
- Hoping for the best - JAC, 6/28/2011, 11:22 am
- Due to high winds, all aircraft have been grounded - JAC, 6/28/2011, 6:44 am
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