After Searchlight New Mexico and other news outlets published a researcher’s findings of 80-year-old plutonium contamination in Los Alamos’s Acid Canyon, lab director Thom Mason deemed the local recreation area a “cleanup success.” Is it? And according to whom?
Alicia Inez Guzmán
Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity and land use in New Mexico. She brings this knowledge to her current role at Searchlight, where she focuses on nuclear issues and the impacts of the nuclear industry. The former senior editor of New Mexico Magazine, Alicia holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in New York.
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A nuclear legacy in Los Alamos
After three cleanups, independent analysis shows 80-year-old plutonium persists in Acid Canyon and beyond
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LANL plans to release highly radioactive tritium to prevent explosions. Will it just release danger in the air?
The venting may harm pregnant women and fetuses, advocates say.
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The long path of plutonium: A new map charts contamination at thousands of sites, miles from Los Alamos National Laboratory
Plutonium hotspots appear along tribal lands, hiking trails, city streets and the Rio Grande River, a watchdog group finds
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The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs
Are America’s plutonium pits too old to perform in the new Cold War? Or are new ones necessary?
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Buried secrets, poisoned bodies
Why did a Truchas woman die with extraordinary amounts of plutonium in her body — and why was she illegally autopsied? For this reporter, the answers hit close to home.
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Chess, cards and catnaps in the heart of America’s nuclear weapons complex
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, workers collect full salaries for doing nothing
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The terrible emptiness of “Oppenheimer”
Bernice Gutierrez was eight days old when a light 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun cracked open the predawn sky. No one in south-central New Mexico knew where it came from, or that the tiniest units of matter could be split to unleash such energy. Nor could they know that when the […]
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Safety lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory
A history of flooding, an earthquake and little fires in the belly of the beast
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The ABCs of a nuclear education
New Mexico’s local colleges are training students to work in a plutonium pit factory. What does this mean for their future — and the world’s?