Toxic Disaster Seeping Below New Mexico

It's been sitting quietly beneath New Mexico for a long, long time and now, a huge toxic body of water is finally making itself known.

It started in Los Alamos with water used to cool a power plant. The contaminated water, loaded with cancer causing heavy metals, became a mile long, underground, body of water that is now beginning to seep into other water sources.

Traces have appeared on the Pueblo de San Ildefonso, a Native community near Los Alamos, that show levels of 53 to 72.9 micrograms per liter. The standard is for there to be no more than 50 so, even at the low end, they're still too high.

Where Did The Toxic Water Come From?

From 1956 to 1972, workers at a non-nuclear power plant at LANL periodically flushed chromium-contaminated water from the cooling towers into Sandia Canyon. Chromium was commonly used as a corrosion inhibitor. The water flowed down Sandia Canyon as surface water, penetrated the underlying rock layers, and in time seeped into the regional aquifer beneath Sandia and Mortandad canyons. - energy.gov

READ MORE: Record Levels Of Toxic Chemicals In Alamogordo Lake

The US Environment Department says there is no reason to panic and no threat to drinking water. Despite that fact that they have found contaminated water under the 39,000 acre Pueblo de San Ildefonso reservation.

The original plan of pumping the water, treating it and then injecting back into the ground remains the same though officials say it will have to be done much more aggressively and a lot more strategically. Those original efforts were stopped in 2023.