S3E27: Los Alamos's Dark Legacy: Plutonium Pollution in Plain Sight

[Uncorrected transcript]

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text the word needles to 53555.

0:00:24 — (Joe Geoffrey) Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:43 - (Chris Clarke): Hello, and welcome to 90 miles from Needles. This is your host, Chris Clark, and today we have a really important interview with Doctor Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry at Northern Arizona University, who's been doing some really important research going out to sites around the location of the old Manhattan project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where during the 1940s and onward, the waste products and byproducts of atomic bomb manufacturing were dumped in the Los Alamos area for a number of years.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): We're going to learn from Doctor Ketterer about just how that might affect people that are living there right now. But first, before we get to Doctor Ketterer, I wanted to remind you that we couldn't do this podcast without you. We have expenses that need to be paid, everything from renting space on servers to keep episodes available to you, to filling gas tanks, to subscriptions to software for audio editing, potential advertising, insurance, that kind of thing. Lots of different things we could be spending money on to help get this podcast out to new people.

0:01:46 - (Chris Clarke): So if you like what we're doing here and you want to help us out financially, or I you want to increase the amount that you're donating already, you can visit nine 0 mile from needles.com donate. Choose from among the options there, or you can text the word needles to 5355, and in reply to your text, you'll get a link to a page where you can select an amount and frequency of donation. Whether you want to give monthly or annually, or just once, it's all good. We have people giving dollar 100 a month.

0:02:18 - (Chris Clarke): We have people giving $5 a month. We have people giving $5.01 time. We appreciate it all, and we thank you for your support. Now let's get on to our interview with Doctor Michael Ketterer on plutonium contamination in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Very grateful to Doctor Michael E. Ketterer, professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University, for joining us on the podcast today. And full disclosure, Doctor Ketterer and I have known each other for a little bit.

0:03:22 - (Chris Clarke): I think it was 1968 when we met.

0:03:26 - (Mike Ketterer): That's about right, yeah.

0:03:28 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And if you do the math, we were both about eight years old. I went to the same very strange school run by primarily by hungarian priests in Buffalo, New York, and got to know each other all the way back.

0:03:40 - (Mike Ketterer): Then, and each of us became, as a result of that experience, became warped in our own way.

0:03:45 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't be the man I am now.

0:03:49 - (Mike Ketterer): That educational experience there at Calasanctius, for me, was more formidable than anything I learned in undergraduate school or PhD school or anything like that.

0:03:59 - (Chris Clarke): It was definitely one of those life shaping experiences, often for good. Not always, but. And incidentally, I was just in Buffalo a couple weeks ago for the first time in 25 years. My dad's 90th birthday was last week, so we had a little bit of a anticipatory party for him. And my wife Lara had never been back there because I have been remiss in introducing her to the members of the family that don't travel out here.

0:04:28 - (Chris Clarke): And we parked in front of my family's old house on Windsor Avenue and walked into the park and walked past the site of the school where we went. And there's no trace of the school.

0:04:42 - (Mike Ketterer): It doesn't look like anything such as a school could have ever been there.

0:04:46 - (Chris Clarke): No. The new building that had the. It was set back in from the street.

0:04:50 - (Mike Ketterer): gymnasium, etcetera,

0:04:52 - (Chris Clarke): had the gym and the cafeteria with those remarkable fries that they had that is not there anymore. And all those houses that were turned into schoolrooms have been turned back in the houses.

0:05:05 - (Mike Ketterer): Okay.

0:05:07 - (Chris Clarke): But at any rate, I have been staying in touch every couple of decades or so to find out what Mike's been up to. And just in the course of putting together our newsletter, Desert News, which is, for those of you who don't know it, a free compendium of desert environmental news that has happened in the past week, I noticed that a really wonderful publication called Searchlight New Mexico had a familiar face and name in one of their top stories, and that my old friend had been doing some remarkable independent research on a public health issue of serious concern going up against the federal government. And I wonder if you would, Mike, like to, to explain how you got into what you're doing at Los Alamos.

0:05:54 - (Mike Ketterer): Sure. Background is in analytical chemistry and in environmental analysis of radionuclides, in particular uranium and plutonium. And late in life in my post career, I've developed an interest in tracing this stuff around the us government and other nuclear sites. And plutonium is an element of great interest as a contaminant at Los Alamos. And that is something that I study and measure how much and its isotope composition. Ive known about Los Alamos for quite some time. And I have been working and collaborating informally with some groups in New Mexico, including Jay Codlin and Scott Kovac and Sophie Stroud of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.

0:06:43 - (Mike Ketterer): And they introduced me to searchlight writer Alicia Guzman, who I would really say has a lot to do with unfolding this and other stories about Los Alamos. She has been doing phenomenal investigative reporting, and I had the pleasure to work with her on a couple of occasions, including this last occasion. And she worked with me in an embargoed fashion to put out the August 15 story. And then we did a press conference that all coincided with a report that I wrote, essentially to the public.

0:07:21 - (Mike Ketterer): I was trying to answer the question, what kinds of plutonium contamination emanates from Los Alamos? Where does it go? And one of the sections of Los Alamos that is known to be contaminated is a place called acid Canyon. Acid Canyon is named after the acid solutions that were plutonium laden and contained other things that were just dumped into the edge of this canyon. At the present site of the Los Alamos City Aquatic center, there used to be some kind of a concrete pad, and the trucks would come up there with barrels, and they would just tip the barrels over the rim of the canyon into the arroyo. And the arroyo flows down from where the aquatic center is in the serpentine fashion. It goes all the way down to what becomes known as Los Alamos Canyon and then goes into the Rio Grande some stream miles later.

0:08:19 - (Mike Ketterer): Acid Canyon is a hiding in plain sight type of contamination, because if you go and you try and interpret every detail of what Los Alamos is not saying about the data that they publicly post on their server called Intellisnm, Intellis New Mexico. So it's a publicly available database that Los Alamos provides for the public. And if you sift through that, you can find interesting results that show contamination is evident here and there and everywhere. But it's like putting jigsaw puzzle pieces together.

0:08:58 - (Mike Ketterer): So Nukewatch New Mexico went and they made, using Los Alamos Intellis Newton data, Nukewatch made an actual map of this, and it's on their website. It's an interactive map, and it's a real advance because it lets the public kind of see where things are. Instead of trying to pick your way through the skin of an elephant and try to figure out what you're looking at, the nufwatch map makes it possible.

0:09:29 - (Chris Clarke): We will put a link to the Nuclear Watch New Mexico map in our show notes.

0:09:34 - (Mike Ketterer): And so I worked with the Nukewatch people on developing and unfolding the map a little bit, and we did that in April. And then I started saying, in collaboration with my colleagues, we need to be doing ground truthing. All of the data that are available to the public are the laboratories data and or the state of New Mexico's oversight data. Nobody really has gone independently like me and seen what's going on. And so that was what I wish to do, to see what's going on behalf of the public in a very independent fashion. I'm not receiving any money from the federal government. I do not have any vested interest in whether it's contaminated or not, as a matter of whether the puck went into the net or did nothing.

0:10:27 - (Mike Ketterer): Los Alamos acid Canyon was one of the first sites that we wanted a ground truth, because it was known that starting in the 1940s, actually before the Trinity test, they were dumping all of these wastes. And Los Alamos, if you listen to their viewpoint on it, they will say, it's all cleaned up. It's a success story. In fact, after our story came out in Searchlight, New Mexico, the Los Alamos lab director, Tom Mason, wrote an editorial in the Los Alamos newspaper and in the Santa Fe newspaper, basically saying that this is much ado about nothing.

0:11:05 - (Mike Ketterer): The levels are not hurting anybody. And this is a success story because we have already performed extensive cleanup, and essentially, it's a problem that's already solved. And we couldn't be more different in our opinions on what this means. I think this is a really egregious situation of environmental contamination. It's really embarrassing. It's embarrassing to the laboratory. They should have egg on their face for letting this sit there for 80 years right where their own families live.

0:11:37 - (Mike Ketterer): This is how little regard our government really has. Just because you're a wealthy scientist and you're caucasian and you're in the upper crust of education, and the stem elite government doesn't give an f about you, they'll let this contamination persist in plain sight for 80 years. And that's exactly what they did. It blows my mind that there's this trickle of water coming down the arroyo on July 2 and July 17, which I filled into a one liter pet bottle, and that I measured concentrations of 80 picocuries per liter of plutonium 239 plus 240. So let me define what that aepocuries per liter is. And then, yeah, in perspective, 80 picocuries per liter.

0:12:31 - (Mike Ketterer): That's an amount of plutonium that is present in a liter. And 80 picocuries is a rate at which it decays. So it takes a certain number of atoms to produce a certain decay rate. 80 picocuries of plutonium is somewhere on the order of one nanogram. One nanogram, or ten to the minus 9th gram, or 1,000,000,000th of a gram, is about the right figure for how much this is. And it just is incredible to me that normally you would not ever find plutonium, really, in any surface water sample. But there's not only an amount that's quite high, it's an extreme amount.

0:13:12 - (Mike Ketterer): There's no federal drinking water standard for plutonium specifically as a constituent because it's so unusual. The only one that. That I know that's enforceable is in Colorado from rocky Flats, a standard of 0.15 picocuries per liter was used. So that's somewhere around two picograms, two, three picograms, something like that. It's 500 times less than what we're talking about here in Los Alamos water.

0:13:44 - (Mike Ketterer): The only regulatory standard that I know that applies is the federal. It's called the gross alpha standard that us EPA puts into place for all waters. And what the gross alpha means is that any or all alpha emitting radionuclides, it could be uranium or it could be radium or something like that. Any or all of them together cannot exceed 50 picocuries per liter. And of course, these samples do. It just really blows my mind that this is somehow okay.

0:14:18 - (Mike Ketterer): This is what Tom Mason. Tom. T h o m. Tom with an H. Tom with an h, is saying. This is all fine. I don't know how to respond to that. I can't see in what way, shape or form it is fine to go on from there. The water is traveling downstream and carrying the plutonium with it. The plutonium is being transported into the Rio Grande. Where I'm sampling is the headwaters, the most contaminated portion of the stuff that goes into the Rio, but it's supposedly cleaned up. Los Alamos did three specific remediations, and according to their lab director, it's a success story. It's cleaned up. It's not a problem.

0:15:03 - (Mike Ketterer): And so then I go there, and there's these extreme levels in the water. There's also fairly high concentrations in the sediment. And then further, I collected some plant vegetation and dried that out and tested that. And the plutonium is actually being uptaken into the plant material. And that's itself a serious consideration because that whole acid canyon area, that open space, public open space, the arroyo and the surrounding trails and so on, it's all within the city limits. It's like an urban wild interface right there. And the canyon itself you could see homes literally half a mile or less from this site, where the plutonium is just sitting there, hiding in plain sight.

0:15:55 - (Mike Ketterer): And there's a lot of contaminated sediments, and they say they cleaned it up. It didn't take me very much effort to find some really high concentration sediments if they cleaned it up, allegedly. And they got a lot more cleaning up to do to consider it cleaned up. It's a joke. And at any rate, Los Alamos is not disputing the results. They're not claiming, oh, your data are wrong. Plutonium is not present.

0:16:20 - (Mike Ketterer): They're not claiming. It's not from the Manhattan project. It's from the soviet 1961 thermonuclear test in the Siberian Arctic. They will say things like that if they can get away with it. But I've already put them on notice that I do this isotope testing using mass spectrometry to explain that to our listeners. There are two major isotopes of plutonium. 239 and 240 are designated as their names, and they differ by the number of neutrons. So one of them is a little heavier than the other.

0:16:57 - (Mike Ketterer): 239 is the desired fissile isotope. 240 does not undergo fission in the same manner, and so it's a contaminant. At any rate, the plutonium that's found anywhere in the world from nuclear weapons tests has a very predictable 239 240 composition 240 over 239 atom ratio is 0.1. If I go most places in the world, if I go to a site where there's weapons grade plutonium at rocky Flats, the ratio in the soil will be more like 0.05.

0:17:38 - (Mike Ketterer): Now, at Los Alamos, it's like 0.010.02, because that is the very early day Manhattan project stuff where they were making plutonium, and by very crude processes and trying to minimize deliberately the amount of 240 in the product so that they were getting plutonium that was on the order of 98%, 99% plutonium 239. That's exactly the stuff that they dumped at acid Canyon. That's what they used in the Trinity test, and that's what is found in the water and in the plants that I took this past July.

0:18:14 - (Chris Clarke): So let's see if I understand this correctly. Plutonium at this point is like microplastics. In that it's a safe bet that anywhere in the world you go, you could find an atom of plutonium. We probably all have some plutonium.

0:18:28 - (Mike Ketterer): The earth's surface has been in the fifties and the sixties. It was dusted with plutonium when we were. It peaked in 1963. In fact, the deposition plutonium.

0:18:39 - (Chris Clarke): And there's a particular isotope signature of that kind of pollution that's come down from the stratosphere.

0:18:46 - (Mike Ketterer): And so there's a global background that has a 240 over 239 ratio of 0.18. So that's like saying about 80% of the 82% of the atoms are 239, and about 18% of the atoms are 240. In the Los Alamos material, the proportion of the isotopes is much different. It's much higher than the 239 and very little 240.

0:19:13 - (Chris Clarke): And if I remember my cold war era studies correctly, the scientists and engineers and designers wanted to reduce the amount of plutonium 240 because it sends out neutrons pretty readily.

0:19:27 - (Mike Ketterer): It undergoes, like, spontaneous fission. It fizzes rather than explodes, is the way to explain it. I'm not really that familiar, Chris, with the nuclear physics of how this works, but it's my understanding that the gun type bomb was not possible with plutonium. Once it was discovered that just a little bit of plutonium 240 would destroy the ability of that gun type bomb to explode in an instant and controlled fashion. It would undergo like a pre explosion. It would be like a dud. Yeah.

0:20:02 - (Mike Ketterer): So they then came up with the implosion model, which solved the problem. But they also recognize that the less 240 that you have, the better off you are. And that's a function of essentially how they were running the reactors at Hanford. If you put uranium fuel rods in and leave them there for a very short time and take them out, then you have a lot of 239 and very little 240, but then you don't get very much, and your yield is low.

0:20:35 - (Mike Ketterer): Production and purity were apparently opposing factors. But the material that's in acid canyon reflects stuff that was dumped in the environment in 1940, 319 44. And they continued throughout the Manhattan project and on into the early Cold War era to conduct the same types of discharges into the late forties, early fifties, and I think it was in the sixties that they started to recognize that some remediation of this canyon would be required.

0:21:10 - (Mike Ketterer): The property of the canyon, the contaminated portion of the canyon, was transferred in the 1980s by the Department of Energy to the county of Los Alamos with the understanding, and there are reports that can be found on government servers that characterize the sites that basically Los Alamos told the county, everything is fine. It's, the site is free for unrestricted use. And they basically say from their health physics models of how much dose can a human receive from the amounts of plutonium that are in the water and the soil? Their health physics models conclude that this is is essentially zero exposure of significance.

0:22:01 - (Mike Ketterer): And that's what the lab director, Tom Mason, is effectively saying in his editorial. I disagree with that. We can't just look at it as there's zero dose. Who cares what the dose is? You put this contamination into the environment, it's there permanently. It can't be fixed. It can't ever be cleaned up. It's laughable. You've contaminated the soil and the vegetation. By you, I'm referring to the laboratory you've contaminated.

0:22:31 - (Chris Clarke): I have an alibi.

0:22:32 - (Mike Ketterer): Yeah, I know. I do, too. They have contaminated this site forever. And it flows downstream, and it's going to flow downstream, and everybody that lives downstream, the downstreamers, as I might call them, they are all the recipients of this contaminated water, contaminated sediments, and then the plant life becomes contaminated. So after the acid canyon winds its way down, it's going into broader, wider canyons, and the higher concentrations are being diluted by larger volumes of uncontaminated or less contaminated sediment.

0:23:14 - (Mike Ketterer): But the contamination, according to Los Alamos zone data that are on the in, tell us. And that went into the nuke watch map. This goes miles and miles downstream. So if you're one of the pueblos, the San Ildefonso pueblo or another one of the pueblos that lives downstream along the Rio, that is in the affected portions of the Rio Grande that have received this contaminated sediment and water, your land, your soil, your sediments, your plant life that grows in that arroyo, if you want to harvest sage and use it for some medicinal purpose, you want to pick wildflowers, all of that is all contaminated forever.

0:24:03 - (Mike Ketterer): And I emphasize forever. I use the word forever. You could say that plutonium and enriched uranium and technetium 99 and some other things are like the Department of Energy's own special flavor of forever chemicals. This is like their own unique little brand. It's their own pig pen trail that goes with them, and it can be found in various forms in different places. There's plutonium plumes at rocky flats, and this is just the first of many plutonium plumes that I expect to be looking into at Los Alamos. One of the things I'm thinking about with Los Alamos, Chris, that's not well recognized, is there were a lot of, in the forties, in the early days, in the forties and in the fifties, there were a lot of air emissions of plutonium aerosols.

0:24:57 - (Mike Ketterer): Just imagine an experimental kind of shop where they got a series of quonset huts and people are poking little galvanized vent stacks through the roof and hooking up a little blower to it, and it's blowing the plutonium dust out right onto the roof. Los AlAmos, the way the town is situated, very close to the laboratory, the production areas where this contamination would have been very close to where people lived and where people now do live.

0:25:28 - (Mike Ketterer): And so their whole town site is to an extent contaminated from past air emissions. I don't think that people that live in Los Alamos laboratory really recognize that, or they want to recognize that. Maybe they know that, or maybe an individual's reaction is a bit more ostrich. Well, I don't really want to even think about that type of reaction. But the people in the town site of Los Alamos, they recreate an acid canyon, and then they live in an environment where there's.

0:25:59 - (Mike Ketterer): In the. Whatever native soils exists there that's all contaminated with past air emissions from Los Alamos. I've tested some of those soils myself and have confirmed that that's not the global stratospheric fallout background. That's the Los Alamos flavor. That's right along the rims of the canyons, in the upland areas that would have received the air emissions. Ironically, I think Los Alamos and the people that live there, it's a very good poster child for why the state of New Mexico really deserves to be the tip of the spear in a revised and an extended RicAE Radiation exposure and Compensation act. It is long past time that the federal government came to apologize and atone for what they've done. Los ALAmos, in the town site, in the laboratory, all the streams that come down, the effect, its impact on downstreamers and downwinders is quite high.

0:27:02 - (Mike Ketterer): New Mexico has the impacts of the Trinity test as well. But Los Alamos is every bit as significant of a problem that should be recognized by Rica. And like I was trying to say before, you can see how the government thinks about its regard for its own citizens in allowing something like this at acid Canyon to persist for so many decades, where some of their, you know, some of their best employees are contractors, actually, but some of their bomb scientists freaking live there, and that's how little they think of them.

0:27:41 - (Mike Ketterer): A few days after this story came out, I got a message from a former student at NAU who was a chemistry student, chemistry major, later got a PhD in chemistry and is now a professor of chemistry at a major university in the east. And he said, I grew up in Los Alamos. My parents were lab people, and we lived right on the rim of acid canyon. And I used to be down there recreating all the time. That blows my mind to hear what you've said. I'm glad you're saying this, though.

0:28:11 - (Mike Ketterer): And he said, maybe it explains a few things about me.

0:28:14 - (Chris Clarke): Gallows humor. That's great.

0:28:15 - (Mike Ketterer): Gallows. Yeah, indeed. So this canyon is probably just one of several egregiously contaminated areas near Los Alamos. I intend to try to trace the flow of contaminated water and sediment using the isotope signatures and contrasting it to the background. I want to try to establish its presence down in the Rio Grande itself. I think that can be done. It's more or less a problem of dilution. There's small, relatively small masses of highly contaminated stuff coming from a few canyons.

0:28:55 - (Mike Ketterer): And then the Rio Grande is vast and it's laden with tons and tons of sediment. So it's a mass balance problem. But the stuff that's coming from upstream essentially has little or no plutonium in it. And if there's any in it, it's this global fallout variety. But then you've got this small amount of very highly contaminated material that comes in sporadically from Los Alamos Canyon. There's also three or four other canyons further downstream that discharge.

0:29:28 - (Mike Ketterer): There's one called Mortendad Canyon which has similar flavors of contamination in it.

0:29:37 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I would think that the dilution would be one factor, but the fact that this has been leaking for four fifths of a century into the general Rio Grande watershed with counteract that a bit.

0:29:50 - (Mike Ketterer): Their amounts are not small. There are tons and tons of contaminated material, but it's being mixed with millions of tons of uncontaminated material.

0:29:59 - (Chris Clarke): There's a huge environmental justice population in the Las Cruces El Paso Juarez area that doesn't need another carcinogen that they have to worry about.

0:30:13 - (Mike Ketterer): Yeah. I don't quite know how to look at the problem of what do you really do? Or what is an intelligent response of when this contamination comes into the Rio? I was trying to think of what is an intelligent response. Let's say I was a downstream community and all of a sudden I learned the water and the sediment and all this nice, rich soil in our floodplain, it's all contaminated. Let's say it's plutonium.

0:30:42 - (Mike Ketterer): Just say hypothetically, there's some downstream community. What is an intelligent response of that community? They can't really clean it up. It's not really a fixable problem. What they can do is they have to almost like live side by side. Good fences make good neighbors. Maybe this community, they need to figure out a water supply or a means of purification of water. They need to grow their food with water deemed to be clean. And whether it's actually hurting somebody or not is a secondary question. I think that from my viewpoint, the downstream community has the right to live there and drink water and grow food and exist in soil and plants and things like that, independent of this uninvited contamination.

0:31:31 - (Mike Ketterer): So their intelligent response needs. How do we organize our life? And I think it starts with knowledge. It starts with environmental monitoring. I tell people, I tell communities all the time, you need permanent environmental monitoring. If you live near a site that has something like this, it's not a stationary picture at all. It's a dynamic picture. It's moving with the wind and with the water and with the dust.

0:31:59 - (Mike Ketterer): And it's a dynamic situation that you have to be continuously vigilant at. If you live near this arroyo that's got some plutonium laden spooge from Los Alamos coming down and you're in one of the pueblos down that way, you need to have the capability of conducting this, testing yourself and understanding it. And you can't assume you have to take responsibility in your own hands for that. You cannot assume that the us government, they won't even apologize to you. They won't.

0:32:33 - (Mike Ketterer): The us government is not even apologizing to new Mexicans by passing Rica. That's how little regard they have for you. They don't care at all about their bomb scientists that live right by acid canyons. They would care even less about people that live farther downstream. One of the things that sticks in my mind, Chris, about reading Tom Mason's editorial is the lack of contrition and the lack of apology.

0:32:58 - (Mike Ketterer): I should probably start my conversation here. I'm an american and I'm going to apologize on behalf of my country. I'm going to apologize to New Mexicans because my government is not doing that. But I will because I know exactly what it's like to be a bound streamer. Because you and I grew up as downstreamers living in north Tiwanda, New York, I had the pleasure of drinking water that was laden with fission products from the West Valley plant. I wasn't given a choice in it. I happened to live downstream and I happened to drink that.

0:33:37 - (Mike Ketterer): I guess I'm okay at age 64. My older sister, who drank the same fission products, she's got a myriad of health problems and my younger brother is deceased from ALS. Did it have an effect? I don't know. But I was subjected to that without my permission. So I know what it's like to be a downstreamer, and I think Tom Mason really needs to think about an appropriate apology to New Mexicans that live downstream of this shining city on the hill.

0:34:06 - (Chris Clarke): Quick explanatory note here. West Valley is the name of a very small town about 35 or 40 miles southeast of Buffalo, New York. West Valley is, unfortunately for people that lived nearby, the site of a shuttered nuclear waste disposal site. In fact, it was the only privately owned nuclear waste disposal site ever to operate in the US. It accepted nuclear waste from nuclear reactors, everything from spent reactor fuel to contaminated gloves and hazmat suits and things like that. From 1966 to 1972, the plant processed about two metric tons of plutonium and about 300 times that much of spent years. Uranium created a huge amount of high level radioactive waste that was at the time, in liquid form, extremely dangerous. It's been solidified, turned into highly radioactive glass cubes.

0:34:59 - (Chris Clarke): Site was closed down a little bit more than 50 years ago, and yet it still poses a significant threat to people in western New York. And aside from the high level waste, which has been made somewhat less hazardous by solidifying it, but it still poses a risk depending on how the site is maintained. There's also a lot of low level radioactive waste which was buried in unlined trenches. And low level radioactive waste isn't necessarily less dangerous.

0:35:25 - (Chris Clarke): It's an accounting category. Basically, low level radioactive waste includes things like those contaminated gloves and hazmat suits and boots. There can be significant amounts of plutonium and uranium and things like that attached to those items. And so those unlined trenches provided basically no protection to the people of western New York when the rains would hit and leach the contaminants off of that low level radioactive waste, send it into Cattaraugus Creek and into Lake Erie and through the Niagara river into Lake Ontario, threatening the drinking water supply of millions of people in western New York and southern Ontario and further downstream. And Mike and I lived downstream from that thing while it was operating.

0:36:12 - (Chris Clarke): What would Rica do if it was passed extended to include folks in New Mexico?

0:36:18 - (Mike Ketterer): Truthfully, very little. But it's a symbolic struggle. If you ask that question to the biggest proponents of pushing for Rica in New Mexico, they would be the Tularosa Basin downwinders consortium. Tina Cordova is the. As a principal of that group and there's a number of the other folks there. I have met them and dealt with them and collaborated with them a little bit. But the way they explain it is the key thing is the acknowledgments.

0:36:47 - (Mike Ketterer): Apologies should be free and they should be easy, but they seem to be so hard. If I were the next secretary of energy, I would have a long list of apologies already and it wouldn't cost anything and it would earn so much goodwill. But no, Tom Mason doesn't want to apologize. But I think that's the key idea in terms of tangible financial benefits. If people get certain types of cancers that are presumptively associated with uranium mining and milling or with atomic weapons fallout, then those cancers are presumed to be associated with the.

0:37:28 - (Mike Ketterer): Those atomic sources and that that person is then given compensation. The amounts of compensation are relatively modest. 5100 thousand, $200,000 probably most of the money disappears into administering the program rather than giving. What the government should do is just hand out money. You lived in Nevada or Utah or New Mexico during these times, or you lived here, you lived there. Here is your severance tax for us having, whatever you want to call it, your payout, our acknowledgement of having caused you harm without your consent.

0:38:08 - (Mike Ketterer): That's, I think, the key idea, Chris, of Rica. And yet Congress is at a complete political stalemate right now anyway, but it seems to be just impossible for everybody to get on board. And there are some senators, Republicans, two of them in Utah in particular, that are adamant that there's no need for any extensions of Rica. There's. This has gone on long enough. Everybody's all dead already. Let's forget about all this and move on.

0:38:41 - (Mike Ketterer): And it's too expensive to be handing out all of this money. This is billions and billions of dollars. It gets talked about as billions and billions of dollars when it's that type of money. As opposed to something else like making new plutonium pits.

0:38:56 - (Chris Clarke): Aside from me reaching out to my fellow former Berkeley resident who might be occupying the White House by next January and seeing if she can help you to be secretary of energy, or at least under secretary of energy for apologies, what else can people do that are hearing about this for the first time?

0:39:16 - (Mike Ketterer): What can people do? I think it starts with awareness, pay attention, ask questions and demand some kind of. Some level of public participation. Interestingly, I mentioned West Valley a little bit ago. In West Valley, the state of New York is involved in that cleanup. But because the public is very vocal and demands a lot of participation in the public process, they get that. I think that in some areas the Department of Energy gets away with whatever they feel they can and they limit public participation to the extent that they can because that's just a complete waste of time and it detracts completely from their mission of making bombs. And that sort of thing.

0:40:05 - (Mike Ketterer): I'm just appalled by the idea that AEP co curies per gram and these egregious concentrations in the water that's cleaned up and it's a success story. I just don't get it. Who am I really want to reach in discussions like this? Chris is I want to reach an audience of 17 to 25 year olds who maybe live in Los Alamos or live near Los Alamos who are tired of drinking a Kool aid. And they're the questioning sort of person.

0:40:40 - (Mike Ketterer): They're not the follow the pipe piper type of person, but they're seeing things for who they are. I want that person to listen and think, what does this mean that there's 80 picocuries per liter? Manassa Canyon. How is this acceptable? In no way, shape, or form is this acceptable. Not only that, I don't want to work for these bastards, even though my mother and father may have. I don't want to do that.

0:41:03 - (Mike Ketterer): I have a bet there'll be a different calling for me in this life, but not that. And I want to reach a person like that. Get them to question and think about the reality of their environment and where they live, and maybe do something to help your people, do something to help the downstreamers. Instead of going to the community college in Espanola and learning to be a glovebox worker, there are community college courses in Espanola, New Mexico.

0:41:31 - (Mike Ketterer): At that college there, I forget what it was called.

0:41:34 - (Chris Clarke): I looked it up. It's northern New Mexico college in Espanola, New Mexico.

0:41:40 - (Mike Ketterer): There are community college courses now about training you to become a chemical operator and handle glove boxes and gas cylinders and things like that so you can make 100 grand working up on the hill in the bomb factory. I want to try to reach people, give them an alternative idea of what the consequences of some of our actions are in dealing with our environment.

0:42:07 - (Chris Clarke): Despite the emeritus, you're still being a teacher, so that's great.

0:42:11 - (Mike Ketterer): I'm trying. I've done a little bit of teaching here and there. I taught a course in 2022, and I taught another course just this past spring, actually, at University of Denver in aquatic chemistry. And so I am still doing some teaching, and I think that what I really want to do is to try to cultivate some young people that want to do this kind of stuff. I'm starting to think about writing a book, a citizen science book, a how to book an idiot's guide to how you can surveil Los Alamos or whatever it is that you live near.

0:42:47 - (Mike Ketterer): People need to do this for themselves. And it's not just the nuclear industry. It's everything.

0:42:52 - (Chris Clarke): I love that idea.

0:42:53 - (Mike Ketterer): EPA and state health agencies, they are all pretty much out of the picture due to regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is the phenomenon that rules the day. It didn't work like that when I worked for EEA. But EPA is a bunch of wusses. They won't even respond to Alicia Guzman's questions about, is it okay that there's 80 picocuries per liter of plutonium in this water? They won't even respond.

0:43:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, sadly, that state is not limited to the EPA.

0:43:30 - (Mike Ketterer): Yes. The Department of Energy is like the bully, the big kid on the block, and they figure that we have custody. We have the Fort Knox. The NNSA has the Fort Knox. And so they get to bully EPA. They get to bully every other agency and get their way and get to put their hand out for as much money as they want.

0:43:53 - (Chris Clarke): Is there anything I should have asked you about that? I neglected to, yeah.

0:43:59 - (Mike Ketterer): I think about what type of regulatory standards should apply to this situation. I think there should be, in New Mexico, a drinking water standard, a surface water standard that exists. Maybe this should be a federal standard, but it certainly should apply to this situation. 0.15 picocuries per liter of plutonium that should be made with standard, and Los Alamos should comply with it. I'm not going to tell them they can or cannot make plutonium pits. I don't get to decide that.

0:44:33 - (Mike Ketterer): But I'm looking at this from the situation is, let me get this straight. You want to make plutonium pits in New Mexico, and you don't even have a drinking water standard for plutonium? No drinking water standard. There's no standard of any kind that applies here. And so there essentially is no regulatory oversight on any contamination that's coming down these arroyos from the new bomb factory that'll be in operation in a few years.

0:45:03 - (Chris Clarke): We're coming up on an hour here and just really appreciate you taking the time to talk.

0:45:09 - (Mike Ketterer): Great to reach out. We ought to talk more and catch up. I don't know if you travel over this way towards Arizona ever, but I think be delighted to have you stop by and catch up.

0:45:20 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, let's do that.

0:45:22 - (Mike Ketterer): Okay.

0:45:22 - (Chris Clarke): Absolutely. Huge thanks to Mike Ketterer for joining us on the podcast today. We're very indebted to him. What you didn't hear, because I edited it out, is we spent a little time conspiring about working together on future episodes involving native people in the desert and their reaction to nuclear contamination. So this looks like it's a good thing. I looked up my old friend and asked him to join us.

0:46:07 - (Chris Clarke): Also wanted to thank a number of people who signed up as supporters. They are Adrian Field, Alicia Arsidi Ocono, Katie Joy Blanksma, whose name you will be hearing more of in the future. She is interested in volunteering with the Desert Advocacy Media Network and Carol Rush. I want to thank you all for supporting the work that we're doing here. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork guy.

0:46:41 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is via envato.com, and I want to thank you for listening. Thanks for supporting what we're doing here. Thank you for doing the work that you do in defense of the desert. We're starting to get a little cooler. It's going to be time to get a couple of episodes in with the sound of foot crunching on hikes as we talk about in the important things.

0:47:10 - (Chris Clarke): Look forward to that and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media Network.