Coverup charged over nuke dump leak

Monday, April 21, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Gas samples containing high levels of radiation were taken from a well 350 feet outside the security fence at the defunct low-level nuclear waste dump near Beatty.

No one, from U.S. Geological Survey researchers to the radiologist who took the measurements three years ago, expected the high radiation levels discovered through laboratory tests.

Today, those findings are at the center of a federal investigation of how fast desert nuclear dump sites might leak.

Ward Valley affected

The investigation could affect desert disposal of low-level nuclear wastes at a proposed site near Needles, Calif., and high-level wastes at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

It is well established that traces of radiation from tritium entered the groundwater as a result of fallout from above-ground nuclear experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But tritium and Carbon-14, a radioactive gas, were found in higher-than-fallout levels southwest of the Beatty dump.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists David Prudic and David Nichols couldn't believe the results from their samples taken in 1994.

Herbert Haas, a Desert Research Institute scientist and carbon-dating expert, at first thought his laboratory equipment was contaminated and skewed the results. But after checking every tube and bottle and burner, Haas said he knew his lab was clean.

A complaint filed by PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, charges that top-level USGS scientists suppressed the test results.

The complaint, filed in January, has been sent to the Western investigative division of the federal inspector general's office in Sacramento, Calif.

In 50 exhibits included in the complaint, PEER investigators said the evidence points to a cover-up.

PEER attorney Jeff Ruch filed more internal documents in a supplemental brief last week.

Although the USGS knew about the extreme radiation levels near Beatty, scientists did not reveal their findings to a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the proposed dump site near Needles, the complaint says.

Reports, e-mail and memos show the USGS at first believed the contamination from Carbon-14 and tritium came from above-ground nuclear weapons experiments.

But contamination levels proved so high, the USGS scientists suspected the radioactivity originated from Beatty's dump, operated by US Ecology until Gov. Bob Miller closed it in 1992.

US Ecology is the Idaho-based company seeking to open the Ward Valley waste dump off Interstate 40 between Needles and Los Angeles.

The Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Southern California environmental group trying to stop the Ward Valley dump, uncovered the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests, said Dan Hirsch, a group spokesman.

Academy left in dark

The USGS shared its data with US Ecology, the Department of Energy and California officials, but not the NAS or Interior Department officials, Hirsch said. That violated USGS policy for releasing information to everyone involved in a research project at the same time.

"I think it's astonishing," Hirsch said of the paper trail linking the USGS headquarters in Reston, Va., to the field office in Carson City.

In October 1995, Gordon Eaton, USGS director, sent a memo warning, "The purpose of this memorandum is to alert you to the fact that this discovery may be used by opponents of the proposed new low-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Ward Valley, Calif., to attempt to block construction of the facility and to challenge the transfer of land for the site from the Department of the Interior to the state."

Eaton made it clear neither source of radiation came from bomb tests, noting "amounts that cannot be explained by fallout from atmospheric bomb-testing or natural generation from cosmic rays."

Earlier, in June 1995, USGS hydrologists received e-mail from Robert Hirsch, chief of the Office of Ground Water in the USGS Reston headquarters.

"Neither of you need to be informed of the can of worms that this will open if we are actually seeing 14-C (Carbon-14) movement from an arid radioactive waste disposal site," he wrote.

The National Academy of Sciences panel, meeting to determine if Ward Valley could contain radioactive wastes after USGS' own scientists sounded the alarm on possible leaks, never learned of the findings. The NAS released its report in September 1995 with two dissenters, one of them Martin Mifflin, a Southern Nevada hydrologist.

Prudic and Nichols came under intense questioning during a hearing in Needles in July, Mifflin recalled.

"They were pretty evasive," Mifflin said. He confronted them with data he had already seen about the radioactive leaks from Beatty. USGS released another report in September 1995, showing radioactive wastes reached the water table, more than 300 feet beneath the surface, in less than 10 years.

"They kind of made a mistake trying to hide all that information," Mifflin said.

A cautious manner

The USGS did share the information with certain parties and contends its scientists did nothing wrong, other than operate in a cautious manner to ensure scientific integrity.

The reason USGS sent the sensitive data to the DOE, PEER argues, was to get a grant for further testing. The USGS received $5,000 from the DOE to resample and confirm the contamination off-site at Beatty.

USGS hydrologist and PEER board member Howard Wilshire blew the whistle on the Beatty findings.

Deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi halted the transfer of federal Bureau of Land Management acreage to California for the Ward Valley dump after learning of Wilshire's concerns last year.

Supplemental environmental impact studies have been under way, while US Ecology and California Gov. Pete Wilson have filed suit against the Interior Department to force the land transfer.