Farmers anxious for water tests

Monday, May 12, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

For pistachio farmer Ralph McCracken of Amargosa Valley, the U.S. Department of Energy should get on with the task of testing area groundwater for nuclear contamination.

McCracken said he has one of 10 farms "worth talking about" in the valley downhill from the Nevada Test Site, where more than 1,000 nuclear weapons exploded above and beneath the desert for 40 years. He said most of the wells supplying area farmers draw water from wells about 200 feet deep and he wants to be confident they are not contaminated.

"We'd like to know after all these years," he said.

Eight years ago, the DOE ordered staff at the Test Site to drill 100 wells to get a better picture of how groundwater flows and how contaminated it is after hundreds of underground nuclear blasts.

To date, only 18 wells have been drilled at the site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But the DOE isn't at fault for the slow progress, said Earle Dixon, technical adviser to the NTS Community Advisory Board, a group of volunteers who watch environmental remediation at the Test Site.

In order to sink a straight drill hole thousands of feet into the complex rock and soils at the Test Site, the DOE has to meet strict state and federal environmental requirements, he said.

"The DOE Nevada Operations Office has resisted open disclosure of information at this time on many (drilling) activities because they are still in the process of developing a successful strategy to study such a difficult, complex problem," Dixon said.

But the DOE's public credibility appears shaky because it doesn't seem to accomplish anything in its programs, he said.

While the public is in no immediate danger from radioactive groundwater contamination from the Test Site, the DOE should know how fast and how far the radioactivity has gone in more than 40 years of testing, Dixon said.

Much of the information from underground nuclear weapons explosions remains classified, frustrating independent and federal scientists who are trying to design a computer model for finding which way the water flows.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection tracks the Test Site's groundwater. If NDEP scientists believe contamination affects people, it has the authority to act, said Paul Liebendorfer, an NDEP scientist with a clearance to review secret information.

"We don't know the flow rate, or how much is there," Liebendorfer said. The state might ask the DOE to control it or contain it, but treating groundwater contaminated with tritium would cost billions of dollars and expose workers to a year's worth of radiation within an hour.

The DOE has already announced that contaminated groundwater spilled onto Air Force lands east of the Test Site in 1995. The extent of that contamination is unknown at this time.