The main dump for Los Alamos, TA-54, which has been in service 35-45 years, is 900 feet above the aquifer that serves Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and 2 miles from the Rio Grande. One of the dozens of disposal areas it contains includes a dump, MDA-C (it is it Area G?) that consists of 4 200 foot shafts, putting their large inventory of toxic and highly nuclear waste only 700 feet above NM’s drinking water table.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_A...
Figure 8 shows at lower right the four negative pressure tents covering the shafts, which were visible from my backyard in White Rock.
Down the street there’s an area very contaminated with chromium from a power plant, that the Feds claim magically stops right at the Pueblo line.
That and whatever you saw barely scratches the surface, no doubt. There are thousands of dump sites in Los Alamos. They didn’t even keep records of all of them or what was in any of them until recently.
The federal government has been battling the state about environmental cleanup for 40 years. For example, they wanted a permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Los Alamos - state of NM doesn’t agree.
I recently spent time living near Los Alamos, NM. The physicists and nuclear chemists surely outdid WW1 in their legacy of environmental devastation. Check out Acid Canyon, a popular recreation area in the middle of Los Alamos. If I recall, they opened this place to the public for recreation in 1962, then a few years later barrels containing plutonium waste surfaced after a heavy rain. Then they opened it again.
http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/site/4-acid-pueblo-canyo...
http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/doublestandard.html
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-...
I guess at some point they stopped dumping untreated liquid plutonium waste there. That was a good move. The wastewater facility for the entire Natl Lab for decades that processed all of the toxic chemical, metal and nuclear waste discharged the water untreated until the 60s. There are dozens of uninventoried dump sites and things like full closets in basements with uranium that nobody has looked at in a couple decades. Oh, and people who work there suggested to me that all the public info made available is falsified for one reason or another.
DP Rd and TA-21, site of first plutonium machining facility, and the wastewater ‘treatment’ (meaning untreated discharge) facility, is another interesting one. They’re currently environmentally remediating the area for homes.