Racer. Connecting community, science and environment

RACER is both a process and tools that provide transparency and accessibility to the environmental monitoring data and ecological impacts in and around Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Risk Analysis, Communication, Evaluation, and Reduction

The RACER Project (Risk Analysis, Communication, Evaluation and Reduction) was implemented in 2003 to provide a process to inform the community, regulators, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), about the chemicals and radioactive materials present in the environment as a result of LANL’s operations and waste management activities.

In recent decades, the public has become increasingly aware that chemicals and radioactive materials are released into the environment by government and private industry. In particular, facilities of the US Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Complex have come under scrutiny from community members who live nearby.  The RACER Project was created and sustained out of the increasing concern of community members after a series of events involving the lab, including the Clean Air Act lawsuit (1997-2003), the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000, and the chromium settlement of 2007.

Implementation of the RACER Project included the development of a consolidated database that organizes and manages environmental monitoring data collected by LANL and the New Mexico Environment Department Oversight Bureau (NMED-OB), as well as a state-of-the-art Data Analysis Tool to access and evaluate this data. The tools are collectively referred to as the RACER Data Analysis Tool (or RACER DAT) and have been available online since the fall of 2008.  The RACER project was founded on the principle that once potentially harmful materials are released into the environment by government or private industry, information gathered to understand their extent and possible impacts becomes public information.  By making environmental data related to a Department of Energy (DOE) facility publicly available and easy to access, RACER is groundbreaking in its comprehensiveness and transparency.  Today RACER contains over 8 million analytical results (including historical data) from the entire LANL site and receives weekly updates from LANL and frequent updates from NMED-OB.  Both LANL and NMED are committed to providing the data from their samples on a regular and consistent basis.  To view the complete history of data updates to RACER, visit the RACER Update Statistic Page.

Over the course of more than a decade, the ideas and design of RACER involved many organizations, professionals, and community members who all helped to shape the way RACER exists today.  Throughout  the project, important lessons have been learned about inter-organizational communication and collaboration, community outreach and the public process – in essence, the factors that are needed to build trust, respect and credibility between operators of a facility that release potentially harmful materials to the environment and the people who live in its surrounding communities.  Today the project is carried out independent of LANL and DOE by the New Mexico Community Foundation (NMCF) who has subcontracted the technical work to the Risk Assessment Corporation (RAC).  The section below explains in more detail how the RACER Project was developed.

Clean Air Act Lawsuit

From 1997 to 2002, Risk Assessment Corporation (RAC) conducted three technical audits as part of a Settlement Agreement and Consent Decree that resolved a citizens’ lawsuit filed by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS) against the U.S. Department of Energy regarding compliance with the radionuclide emission standards of the Clean Air Act at LANL.  Prior to the lawsuit, in 1996 federal district Judge Edwin Mechem ruled that 31 of LANL’s 33 radionuclide emitting stacks and vents were not in compliance.  He ordered the parties to settle the case, which resulted in establishing the audits.  The audits were supported by the U.S. Department of Justice and independently monitored by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and representatives of CCNS to verify their thoroughness and completeness.

All activities related to the audits were open to the public and thoroughly documented; additionally, public meetings were held to inform all interested parties of the audit findings.  The public’s role in the process was critical and the success of the audits reflected the cooperation of the diverse parties who worked with the audit team.   During the third audit, extensive discussions were held between RAC, LANL, and the independent monitoring  group (IEER) about the need for LANL to make environmental data more readily and easily accessible to the public ( See: “Voluntary Compliance Evaluation Involving Stakeholders: A Model for the Future” beginning on p. 89)

Cerro Grande Fire

In May of 2000, LANL was faced with immediate and intense public scrutiny related to information dissemination when the Cerro Grande Fire burned across approximately 47,000 acres of land, including 7,000 acres of laboratory property.  Some of the areas burned were known or suspected to be contaminated with radioactive materials and chemicals, yet conveying credible and timely information about the risks to the public proved to be an enormous challenge for the lab.  Although considerable environmental data were collected during and following the fire, these data were not uniformly available or consistent across media type (i.e., soil, air, water) or across the collecting organizations.  Facing growing public concern, LANL asked the Risk Assessment Corporation to provide an assessment report of the impacts associated with releases from the fire based on monitoring data from different agencies.

As a result of the Cerro Grande Fire work, LANL and the NMED developed a better approach for sharing information about their environmental data related to the lab and for working together to engage the public.  But what was still missing was a consistent approach to data management and consolidation to facilitate long-term information sharing in a way that increased credibility with regulators and the local community.   This led the DOE and LANL to fund a new project that would implement recommendations from what was learned during the Cerro Grand Fire.  This new project evolved into what is known today as the RACER Project.

Chromium Contamination in Groundwater

In 2006, the New Mexico Environment Department issued a Notice of Violation after DOE and LANS violated their hazardous waste permit by failing to report significant elevations in chromium levels in a groundwater monitoring well.  Between 2004 and 2005, four groundwater samples taken from a well located in Mortandad Canyon detected toxic hexavalent chromium at up to four times the drinking water standard and up to eight times the state groundwater quality standard.  However, LANL did not report the findings to NMED until late 2005.

In the summer of 2007, a settlement was reached requiring the lab to pay a large civil penalty as well as increase its review and reporting of analytical data from all groundwater monitoring sites.  The settlement also required LANL to continue funding the RACER Project.

The RACER Project

In 2003, Colorado State University (CSU) received funding from LANL to begin work on the project and asked RAC to carry out the technical work. The contract between CSU and Los Alamos was unique in that it guaranteed there would be no technical interference in the project while it was being completed. CSU’s role was to ensure the completeness of the project and to provide independent peer review of the science it entailed.

The initial focus of the project was to develop a database that contained environmental data related to Los Alamos. This was a significant challenge because so much data had been collected over the years and compiled and stored in various formats and locations. Establishing consistency and completeness for key aspects of the data like units, chemical and radionuclide nomenclature, and location coordinates were critical to ensure the data could be accessed and used efficiently by the public, regulators, and LANL alike. While the database was being developed, so was another feature of RACER now known as the Data Analysis Tool (DAT).  The DAT allows users to make comparisons of the measurement data with regulatory guidelines or other meaningful values in order to better understand the significance of the data. The RACER Database and Data Analysis Tool (DAT) were developed as a web-based application that is publicly available online.

As RACER evolved, it was recognized that if the project was to endure upon completion it must be managed by an independent organization, preferably located in New Mexico. The New Mexico Community Foundation (NMCF) , a state-wide non-profit, was identified as the best candidate and agreed to administer the management responsibility for the project.  With the project nearing completion in the summer of 2009, RACER was formally turned over to the NMCF from CSU.  The NMCF requested that RAC continue as the technical steward of RACER until the project’s completion, after which the NMCF will identify one of New Mexico’s academic institutions to assume responsibility as the long-term technical steward.  In accordance with an agreement between RACER’s supporting agencies, the US Department of Energy, LANL, and NMED, RACER is to be funded until 2015.

RACER has significantly changed how environmental data related to LANL are managed. The RACER Database and Data Analysis Tool contain a comprehensive set of environmental data in a consistent format, readily accessible to anyone who wants to view and understand it. No other Department of Energy facility or major industry provides this level of transparency and accessibility. RACER is the result of many individuals coming together with ideas to change how we view and understand environmental measurement data that are collected for regulatory and decision making purposes.  A primary goal of RACER is to build trust and credibility between the operators of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New Mexico Environment Department, and their stakeholders.  Although it will take years to establish such trust and credibility, the principles of RACER have helped lay the groundwork for a new standard of accountability and transparency for industry and government throughout the country.