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.
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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.”
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