Study fails to find path of Test Site ground water

Thursday, Nov. 4, 1999 | 11:13 a.m.

After spending $176 million to study ground water for signs of nuclear traces at the Nevada Test Site, the Department of Energy has failed to find out if any contaminated water has escaped the Rhode Island-sized site.

A DOE official said the federal agency may have to give up trying to predict where the contamination will flow and end up monitoring indefinitely the areas where 260 underground nuclear weapons exploded in or near ground water during almost 50 years of testing.

Federal officials in the past 10 years have shifted from building nuclear warheads to environmental cleanup at the Test Site. Since then DOE researchers have tried to predict where the contamination is moving so efforts to contain the radiation on the site can be targeted.

DOE and Nevada environmental officials are willing to spend up to three more years trying to gather enough information to make a failed computer model work. The model is designed to predict where radioactive water may run and how fast it will leave the site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The state Division of Environmental Protection has not approved the Energy Department's approach to studying Frenchman Flat, the area where DOE researchers are developing the computer model. Frenchman Flat is the simplest area to study on the Test Site with only 10 underground nuclear explosion sites, state project manager Paul Liebendorfer said.

Federal researchers for 30 years have monitored ground water from eight wells dug in a row to try to identify whether the radiation is moving in a plume pattern through the ground. Critics say the DOE should have used deeper wells dug in a random pattern to identify a plume.

The state and DOE have identified boundaries of six areas where nuclear bombs were tested. The state may require the DOE to contain contamination within each of those areas and require more monitoring wells at a cost of about $2 million each, Liebendorfer said. The DOE is required to meet the state's environmental standards.

The state is forcing the DOE to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's limit of 4 millirems of radiation moving through ground water. That's equal to about half of a chest X-ray. But the state has not decided how far from the actual bomb cavities samples will be taken to meet that standard.

"It turns out that nothing is simple about testing the ground water there," the DOE's Carl Gertz, who is overseeing the environmental program at the Test Site, said.

If the DOE and the state cannot find a workable ground water forecast, the federal government is considering a permanent monitoring program, Gertz said.

How many wells would be needed or the cost for such a program is unknown, Gertz told the Community Advisory Board to the Test Site Wednesday night at UNLV. The advisory board offers a forum to the public for expressing environmental, health and safety concerns to the DOE.

To improve the DOE's performance at the Test Site, the Nevada Operations Office needs at least $20 million more each year, Gertz said. There are 10 other DOE sites nationwide vying for environmental cleanup money, he noted. While a site such as Hanford, Wash., may expose 3,000 workers a year to radiation, only 13 Test Site workers received measurable radiation doses last year, Gertz said.

"There are no present or anticipated near-term risks to the health and safety of the public or workers," Gertz said.

That's because there has never been radiation detected in ground water more than 200 feet away from any of the 828 underground nuclear tests, Gertz said.

However, independent scientists have criticized the DOE for failing to gather enough data to even guess at where the radioactive water might be or what is in it.

Experts in 1996 and in September said that the DOE flunked the test for finding out how far contaminated water has gone and what kind of radiation is in it, Dennis Weber of UNLV's Harry Reid Environmental Research Center said. Weber was one of six experts who gave the DOE a failing grade for its computer model forecast.

At Frenchman Flat, at the southeastern edge of the Test Site, the line of eight wells told the experts that the DOE had failed to find how deep the water goes, how far -- if any -- radioactive contamination has spread and if it flowed faster through earthquake faults. The 30 years of information was too scanty, they said.

In the 1970s the U.S. Geological Survey recommended to the DOE that Frenchman Flat needed monitoring wells drilled along its eastern edge to rule out any signs of ground water contamination flowing toward the Las Vegas Valley. But the DOE never funded the program.

In 1990 a DOE review panel ordered 99 new wells at a cost of $100 million to be drilled, because the experts "couldn't tell which way the water flowed under the Test Site," a report stated.

"Perhaps no matter how much data we get, we may never satisfy the regulator," Gertz said.

Tom Buqo, a hydrologist independently testing the water running south of the Test Site for Nye County, said the DOE should continue monitoring the ground water but pay for a new supply from Lake Mead to the rural communities that will feel the brunt of contamination first.

Buqo estimated it will cost $425 million to build a 125-mile-long pipeline from Lake Mead to Nye County to supply those residents with enough water and to protect natural resources such as endangered species while allowing the federal government to "do whatever it wants at the Nevada Test Site."