Consultant's Credibility Doubted; Group Tracks LANL Emissions

Albuquerque Journal, John Arnold
Published January 10, 2006

A Washington D.C.-based environmental watchdog says an environmental consulting firm hired to track decades worth of pollution at Los Alamos National Laboratory should be taken off the job. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hired ChemRisk in 1999 to determine how much pollution has been released by the lab since it was built in 1943. But the Environmental Working Group is asking the agency to suspend ChemRisk's contract, after the organization learned that the company is involved in investigating chromium contamination in the Los Alamos regional aquifer. EWG contends that ChemRisk has a conflict of interest in performing such work because the company was hired by California's Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to help that utility fight the chromium contamination lawsuit depicted in the film "Erin Brockovich." EWG also accuses ChemRisk of distorting data to reverse findings in a 1987 Chinese study linking stomach cancer to chromium contamination. ChemRisk's role in the California lawsuit and re- analyzing the Chinese study for PG&E was detailed in a Wall Street Journal report published last month. "As far as I'm concerned, their credibility is destroyed," said Bill Walker, head of EWG's West Coast office in Oakland. ChemRisk disputes the Wall Street Journal report and says EWG's accusations have no bearing on its work at Los Alamos. Walker has written a letter to Centers for Disease Control director Julie Gerberding, urging her agency to suspend ChemRisk's LANL contract and bar the firm from future CDC contracts. "Now we see that (ChemRisk's LANL work) is a direct conflict of interest, because ChemRisk is paid by PG&E and other polluters to downplay the risk of chromium in drinking water," Walker wrote. Since it began the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment Project in 1999, ChemRisk has been reviewing millions of documents to identify and evaluate past releases of radioactive materials and toxic chemicals at LANL. Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration reported that chromium-6 levels found in a monitoring well in Mortandad Canyon at Los Alamos were more than four times federal drinking water standards and eight times the state ground-water quality standard. The state Environment Department has ordered an investigation into the contamination and has given the lab 90 days to come up with a plan to deal with it. So far, tests have shown that Los Alamos' drinking water wells have not been contaminated. Tom Widner, who is heading up the LANL data retrieval project for ChemRisk, said Monday that his team is taking a closer look at its chromium data and would include the lab's most recent findings. Widner said that ChemRisk employees involved in reanalyzing the 1987 Chinese study dispute the accuracy of the Wall Street Journal report and EWG's accusations, which he said were irrelevant to his team's work at Los Alamos. "I don't see any reason why that should be an issue at all," Widner said in a phone interview Monday. "Anybody who's followed our process- how we've been doing our investigation- nobody's brought up any questions about the credibility of our project team. Everything we do is a very open process." Chromium is a metal used in stainless steel, metal coatings and paint pigments. DOE officials have said that possible sources of contamination in the Los Alamos Regional Aquifer could be waste discharges and water cooling towers, where chromium is used to prevent scaling. Prolonged exposure to chromium-6 can cause liver and kidney damage and has been linked to certain kinds of cancer.