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Los Alamos Laboratory Closed Amid Wildfire Concerns
New Mexico’s Las Conchas wildfire keeps charring acres of land. Officials at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is one of the foremost nuclear weapons facilities in the country, said that the facility will remain closed until Wednesday.
Lab officials, in a press statement, said that the fires did not burn any property belonging to the lab overnight. More firefighters and equipment were rushed in to deal with any damage.
“All nuclear and hazardous materials, including those at the lab’s principal waste storage site known as Area G, are accounted for and protected,” the statement reads, adding that “monitoring teams detected no releases of radiological or other contaminants.”
Only a select few employees were allowed on the premises on Tuesday with others being urged to remain off-site until it reopened.
As a precautionary measure, officials re-filled water tanks at the lab’s helicopter landing pad to help fire crews deal with the encroaching fire.
The Las Conchas fire sparked a small blaze on the Los Alamos property on Monday but it was quickly extinguished.
Fire officials with the U.S. Forest Service say that the blaze has burned around 49,000 acres of canyons, forests, and mesas in northern New Mexico, southwest of the lab. Several towns have remained under mandatory evacuation, including the nearby city of Los Alamos, which has a population of 12,000.
The lab is where nuclear weapons were first developed in the US. Officials have been posting pictures of the fire on online image-sharing websites.
Even though officials said that the nuclear material inside Los Alamos is secure from the fire, a former top security official, Glen Walp, told ABC News that there could be problems.
{etRelated 58039}"Potential is high for a major calamity if the fire would reach these areas," he told the news agency, adding that waste is stored around three miles from where the fire is currently.
"It contains approximately 20,000 barrels of nuclear waste," Walp told ABC. "It’s not contained within a concrete, brick and mortar-type building, but rather in a sort of fabric-type building that a fire could easily consume."
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