The large-scale production of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has had a significant long-term impact on the environment. In the United States, several sites associated with fissile material production as well as nuclear weapon component manufacturing, such as pit production, have been turned into EPA “superfund” sites, and are still being cleaned-up at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. Beyond routine discharge of radionuclides to the environment, some sites also experienced significant radiological accidents often impacting nearby indigenous, minority, and low-income communities. This paper discusses how advances in atmospheric transport modeling, weather reanalysis, and geographic information service techniques offer new opportunities to revisit the consequences of past accidents through an environmental justice lens. As an example, it presents a new reconstruction of the 1957 plutonium fire that took place at the Colorado Rocky Flats plant. These tools could also be used to assess the potential impact of radiological releases today leveraging even better spatial and temporal resolution weather data and census information.
Year
2024
Abstract