Radioactive soil to be moved to Test Site

Tuesday, May 20, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The U.S. Department of Energy this week will begin moving 125,000 cubic feet of soil following the cleanup of part of the Nellis Air Force Range contaminated by nuclear weapons testing during the early 1960s.

The site, known as Clean Slate 1, was scraped down 6 inches in an effort to remove the contaminated soil. The scraped-off soil was placed inside polypropelene wrappers, then placed in covered compartments for trucking to Area 3, a disposal area at the Nevada Test Site.

The contained soil will travel on federal Tonopah Test Range and Test Site roads, as well as public roadways including State Route 504 and U.S. 6 and 95 over a six- to eight-week period.

Santa Fe Enterprises, a local, woman-owned small business, has been awarded an $861,000 subcontract to ship the low-level radioactive materials from the Tonopah Test Range to the Test Site.

The soils were contaminated in 1963 as part of a joint U.S.-United Kingdom operation called "Roller Coaster." The Atomic Energy Commission, now the DOE, tested the safety of nuclear weapons in simulated accident conditions.

The Clean Slate 1 test, which contained 3,269 pounds of explosives, including three pounds of plutonium, contaminated the soil.

As the second of four Operation Roller Coaster sites to be cleared, Clean Slate follows the Double Tracks demonstration project, selected first because it was close to a populated area, Goldfield, 14 miles to the west. And, it had the smallest plutonium contamination.

"At the Clean Slate sites, we will use what we learned during the Double Tracks remediation," said Monica Sanchez, DOE project manager.

The DOE plans to use a technology known as KIWI, a radiation contamination detector, Sanchez said. "We will excavate contaminated soil in the same way we did at Double Tracks, using scrapers and front-end loaders," she said. Most of the heavy equipment was already there after the Double Tracks project.

Once the Clean Slate site is clear, it will be planted in the fall, she said.

The DOE is working to return all Operation Roller Coaster sites to the institutional control of the U.S. Air Force. That should occur after the sites have been planted in 1998. There are two more sites to clear.