By Tammy Webber
Adapted for radio by S. Baxter Clinton
Climate change increasingly threatens some of the nation's most sensitive sites, including research laboratories, military facilities and power plants with radioactive material.
Extreme heat and drought, longer fire seasons with larger, more intense blazes and supercharged rainstorms that can lead to catastrophic flooding are forcing a reckoning that environmentalists and experts say is long overdue.
Many sites are contaminated or warehouse decades of radioactive waste, while some perform critical energy and defense research and manufacturing that could be crippled by increasingly unpredictable extreme weather.
Among them: The 40-square-mile Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where a 2000 wildfire burned to within a half mile (0.8 kilometers) of a radioactive waste site. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Southern California, where a 2018 wildfire burned 80% of the site, narrowly missing an area contaminated by a 1959 partial nuclear meltdown. And the plutonium-contaminated Hanford nuclear site in Washington, where the U.S. manufactured atomic bombs.
In February, wildfires came within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of the Pantex Plant in Texas, which assembles and disassembles nuclear weapons and stores thousands of plutonium pits — hollow spheres that trigger nuclear warheads and bombs.
Fire didn't reach the site, and officials said plutonium pits — in fire-resistant drums and shelters — likely would not have been affected. But the size and speed of the fires, urgent efforts to dig firebreaks and the decision to send workers home underscore what's at stake.
The Texas fire season often starts in February, but farther west it has yet to ramp up.
Program director at Green Cross International and a former House Armed Services Committee staffer Paul Walker said, “I think we’re still early in recognizing climate change and ... how to deal with these extreme weather events,” “What might have been safe 25 years ago probably is no longer safe.”
That realization has begun to change how the government addresses threats.
The Department of Energy in 2022 required sites to assess climate risks to “mission-critical functions and operations,” and plan for them. It cited wildfires at two national laboratories and a 2021 freeze that damaged “critical facilities” at Pantex.
Yet the agency does not consider future climate risks when authorizing new sites or projects, or in periodic environmental assessments. It only considers how sites themselves might affect climate change, which critics call short-sighted and potentially dangerous.
