NTS contamination disputed

Thursday, March 28, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear physicist said he has calculated much higher levels of radioactive contamination at the Nevada Test Site than federal scientists.

But the U.S. Department of Energy won't offer enough information to confirm the results, Anthony Hechanova said Wednesday night at a meeting of the Nevada Risk Assessment Management Program.

NRAMP is an independent group studying possible future risks from more than 40 years of nuclear weapons experiments at the Test Site. It has about six months to complete its work.

Hechanova said tritium levels at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, may be 1,000 times higher than the DOE figures.

The DOE says there are 300 million curies of radioactive contamination on the 1,340-square-mile site. Most of it is probably tritium, Hechanova said. "My calculations put us much higher than this," he said, referring to work he began while writing his doctoral thesis.

The DOE is beginning to release locations where the weapons exploded, but Hechanova said he needs to know how deep the contamination goes into the soils.

Most of the contamination sits on 8 percent of the Test Site, according to Dennis Weber, another NRAMP member and former Environmental Protection Agency scientist.

But that 8 percent equals 100 square miles of land, he said. Hechanova, Weber and Bill Andrews work at UNLV's Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies.

The Test Site's future is hard to picture because so much information needed to find out risks remains top secret, Andrews said. The gaps may indicate more hydrogen bombs were triggered at the Test Site than already announced.

"This is a very large discrepancy," Andrews said. "It's a potentially significant issue."

The DOE is trying to conclude a number of environmental impact statements concerning the future of the Test Site by the end of this year. If NRAMP can find enough information, the group plans to present sensible-risk estimates to the DOE for future land use at the Test Site, Andrews said.