DOE to dig into buried parts of nuke engines

Monday, March 8, 1999 | 10:50 a.m.

Department of Energy crews this summer will begin to bore under pits where radioactive rocket parts were buried after the development of nuclear engines in the 1960s.

Their goal is to see whether the radioactivity from U.S. tests on nuclear engines has started to move through the soil or ground water, DOE spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said. The Nevada Test Site's mission into the next century is to clean up Cold War contamination.

Nevadans have a continuing distrust of the DOE when it comes to nuclear materials buried in the state. Some believed that radioactive fuel rods from experimental spacecraft engines had been buried at the Test Site. The DOE says that the pits at the Test Site contain only radioactive equipment and materials left over from the nuclear rocket program and that all rocket fuel is in Idaho.

Further raising suspicions, the site is near the entrance to Yucca Mountain, the only location under study as a national repository for high-level nuclear waste.

"We are gathering old records, which are scattered right now," Harkess said. DOE scientists hope a full inventory will reveal how many engines and contaminated parts are buried in the pits and where.

"We know where the pits are," Harkess said. But before they start digging, DOE scientists also must do tests to see what types of soils they'll encounter and whether they may run into any earthquake faults.

Once those tasks are complete, DOE environmental managers will devise a plan to monitor and test the site.

"We don't want to go digging around before we have a good idea of what's there," Harkess said. "You don't want to get into any contamination as a surprise."

The DOE estimates that the total radiation in Area 25, where the pits are located, is about one-10th of the exposure from an average chest X-ray.

To monitor the site, DOE crews plan to drill horizontally under the pits to see whether radiation is moving through the soil or water, she said.

Subhed: Failed experiment

What's buried in the Test Site's pits is equipment used in tests of nuclear-powered rocket and airplane engines from a time when the government planned to send such spacecraft into deep space.

Parts were buried at the site in Area 25 after they became contaminated with radiation during firing experiments.

The Atomic Energy Commission, now the DOE, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration managed the Nuclear Rocket Development Station at the Test Site from the mid-'50s until President Nixon canceled the program in 1972.

The government spent more than $100 million to build and equip the testing area for nuclear space experiments. The Rover Program, as the space experiments were known, proved that a nuclear reactor could be used to heat liquid hydrogen for propelling craft into space.

Kiwi, Phoebus, Peewee and Nuclear Furnace were names given to reactors designed to withstand high temperatures and long-living fuels in space that were fired at the Test Site. Like the flightless kiwi bird, the engines never left Earth. Instead, they were buried at the testing site once Nixon canceled the costly program.

Once the nuclear space program ended, however, the government had a problem: What to do with the radioactive fuel rods, similar to those piling up around commercial electric power reactors today.

Federal scientists at that time believed they could reprocess the fuel rods, so they sent 90 tons of them from the Test Site to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, according to a 1996 DOE inventory report.

But the reprocessing work failed. A graphite covering on the radioactive rods -- to shield people and the environment from radiation -- proved too difficult to separate from the radioactive elements uranium and plutonium. So the fuel rods remain in Idaho, the DOE says.

Harkess said that part of the DOE's mission at the Test Site is to monitor and clean up radioactive debris.

That will take 71 years, in part because the Test Site sprawls across an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.