Spent nuclear fuel rods from engines lost at NTS

Thursday, Feb. 11, 1999 | 10:53 a.m.

The Department of Energy is searching for nuclear fuel rods buried on the western edge of the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, said Pat Bodin, declassification officer for the Nevada Operations Office.

The information came to light as films detailing nuclear mishaps during the Cold War were released, telling stories of people left on an island near a Bikini atoll during a nuclear test and of nuclear bombs accidentally dropped from aircraft and buried in several states.

Area 25 was used to test nuclear-powered engines that engineers hoped to send on long space flights. The radioactive fuel rods from those rocket engines are buried in the area, but the number and exact location are unknown at this time, Bodin said. President Nixon canceled the nuclear rocket program in 1971 because it was too costly.

Area 25 is part of the DOE's study site for a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, belongs to the Air Force and the Bureau of Land Management, but the entrance to the exploratory tunnel is on the Test Site in Area 25.

The DOE will define the amount of radioactive fuel and where it is buried as part of environmental cleanup efforts, Bodin said.

The documentaries by filmmaker Douglas Keeney showed that the U.S. military forgot to pick up nine people on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where an airplane dropped a hydrogen bomb onto a nearby Bikini atoll.

Documentary filmmaker Douglas Keeney discovered an anonymous account of the ordeal the nine experienced on May 20, 1956, during the atomic test "Cherokee" while he was digging through 2,000 pages of declassified DOE documents for a story on lost atomic bombs.

"They were sent out there in combat boots, shorts and T-shirts to set up monitors for the blast, but by 6 a.m. on test day, they knew no one was coming to get them," Keeney said, during the DOE's second declassification film festival at the Flamingo Library on Wednesday.

"And they did not want to go out there in the first place," he said.

The people sought shelter in a three-room concrete bunker and after the bomb's shock wave passed, ventured outside. Instruments measured radiation from the blast off the scale. The nine calculated they could not survive for more than 18 minutes outside.

So each of them took turns leaving the bunker with a walkie-talkie for less than 10 minutes to avoid radiation poisoning and managed to contact a passing ship. They were rescued.

Keeney, with the help of other military veterans exposed to radioactive fallout during tests in the Pacific or at the Nevada Test Site, believes he has discovered one of the nine people who survived. "That's a story in itself," he said.

A historian and pilot, Keeney has been fascinated with accidents involving nuclear weapons during his career making 65 documentaries.

A caller from Great Britain suggested he research the Strategic Air Command files. That phone call led him to film a documentary, "Lost Bombs," and write a book with the same title. Both the book and his films, "Survivors" and "Lost Bombs" are due for release in June to cable TV channels.

It took Keeney four years to glean the nuclear accidents out of Defense Department and DOE files, because the DoD will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any specific location.

The lost nuclear warheads fell onto land and sea from North Carolina to Japan, Keeney discovered with the help of documents from the Coordination Information Center at DOE's Nevada Operations North Las Vegas facility.

"The DOE's declassification project has helped us tell stories we could never tell," said Keeney, who does his storytelling through his two businesses, Artwood Keeney, a documentary television production company, and Avion Park publishing label. He lives and works in Louisville, Ky.

"They help you find stuff that hurts them," Keeney said, marveling at the open nature of the DOE since former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced in 1993 a public airing of once-secret nuclear tests and other information veiled under a cloak of national security.

Of 32 nuclear warhead incidents reported by the DOE in the past two years, 11 major accidents involved nuclear weapons, and 13 devices were lost or destroyed.

Keeney visited a North Carolina farm field where a nuclear bomb fell out of a military plane and buried itself in the water table. "There's no fence, there are no signs warning about the dangers of radiation," he said.

Two more nuclear warheads have been lost off the coast of Atlantic City, and a bomb has disappeared in the Pacific Ocean near Washington state. Both incidents occurred from accidental drops from airplanes.

Other states with nuclear mishaps include Texas, Louisiana, Florida, California, New Mexico, Georgia and South Carolina. Mishaps also occurred in Japan and Palomares, Spain.