Various: No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says the New York Times.
...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.
They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...
Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos scientist points out that some of the extra care concerning explosives may be unwarranted. LANL used to blow up old explosives on a frequent basis in the area close to the dump, and Rofer suspects that:
...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.
I feel reasonably confident that no explosives were ever buried, but I probably should have conditioned that statement a bit more than I did.
The problem is that once something like this (that explosives were buried in Area F, not the pit the Times seems to be referring to, which is Area B) is written down, it has to be taken seriously. I'd bet money there are no explosives buried in Area F. I wouldn't bet my teams' lives.
Add in the risk-averse culture of the DOE, and you have a very expensive project.