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If you review the safety and environmental procedures and precautions for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and the US military and federal government in general, they were rather lax through the 70s or 90s depending on your perspective. The scientists at Los Alamos hardly seemed to understand how dangerous are the chemicals they worked with - all of the wastewater was dumped untreated into the pond in the center of town until 1962. Same with all the water from the world’s first plutonium milling facility - dumped untreated into the desert. That created a pollutant plume ~550 feet deep. All of the waste from the Manhattan project (plutonium, uranium, beryllium, lead, PCBs, solvents, radioactive rubble of all sorts) was put into unlined landfills in Los Alamos with little documentation. This happens to be upstream from 90% of the population of New Mexico, on sandy soils 2-5 miles from the largest river in the region.