Guinn seeks expanded NTS ground water tests

Monday, Dec. 20, 1999 | 11:50 a.m.

Gov. Kenny Guinn has asked the U.S. Department of Energy for an extra $40 million to expand the monitoring of ground water for radiation contamination at the Nevada Test Site from hundreds of nuclear weapons exploded from 1951 until 1992.

The governor said in a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson that estimates of ground water contamination may extend beyond 300 square miles. The Test Site encompasses 1 million square miles. Contamination depths may range from 500 to 5,000 feet, Guinn said.

"If this contamination moves offsite, it would eventually affect public and private lands encompassing thousands of square miles," Guinn said.

"No other site in the DOE weapons complex contains a comparable volume of contamination, and no other site is faced with mounting uncertainties concerning how this contamination can be effectively characterized, monitored and contained over the long-term," Guinn said.

Guinn wrote to Richardson on Dec. 7. As of late Friday, the governor had not heard from the DOE.

"Nope, not a word yet," Guinn's spokesman Jack Finn said.

Guinn asked that the ground water funds be included in the 2001 budget, which begins Oct. 1.

Since a moratorium on nuclear weapons experiments at the Test Site began in 1992, Nevada and DOE officials have tried to market the remote basin for other uses, such as retrievable space craft launches and scientific field experiments in alternative energy.

Guinn also asked that the DOE adequately fund defense program cleanup, such as closing 4,000 wells and boreholes on the site and removing or restoring 1,500 buildings, and sheds on the site.

The DOE's environmental management plan calls for continued monitoring of the Test Site for up to 75 years. However, there are no extensive proposals for cleaning up the desert site, chosen as the U.S. continental nuclear proving ground.

President Truman ordered the Nevada site opened in 1951 after U.S. nuclear weapons experiments in the Pacific Islands became too expensive and the Korean War endangered those tests.

In the mid-1990s the DOE began drilling new wells and monitoring the water after federal scientists discovered plutonium almost a mile from a 1968 underground nuclear weapons experiment in the northwest corner of the Test Site, known as Pahute Mesa.

However, the southeast boundary of the Test Site near an experimental area known as Frenchman Flat has never been monitored. The U.S. Geological Survey requested monies for monitoring wells along the eastern and southern borders of the area, but Congress never funded such a program. Las Vegas is 65 miles southeast of the test area.

More than 250 underground nuclear experiments were exploded at or near the ground water table at the Test Site.

To date, the DOE has reported no radioactive contamination in any off-site well or any drinking water source on the site. The department has spent $176 million so far on monitoring the ground water in the 90s.

Ground water computer models from both areas flunked independent scientific review earlier this year. Scientific experts said that the DOE did not have enough data about how fast the water flowed or in what direction it traveled to allow either model to work.