The facility called in teams to track readings that measure levels of plutonium and uranium in the air. Tuesday morning firefighters struggled to fight back the out of control blaze at the nuclear weapons complex including its plutonium facility.
Firefighters worked all day at the boundary of the laboratory site, which is the United State largest supply of nuclear weapons. The laboratory was shut down, and the town of Los Alamos, home to about 12,000 people, were under a mandatory evacuation.
The fire burned part of the site known as the Tech Area, 49, which was used in the early 1960s for a series of underground tests with high explosives and radioactive materials. Authorities said Monday night that radioactive and hazardous material were beyond the fire's reach, and that efforts in previous years to clear dry brush and other ground fuels had paid off in helping firefighters keep the fire under control.
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (an anti-nuclear watchdog group) said the fire was 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 would not 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. As of late Monday, the fire had scorched 44,000 acres.
