DOE told to conduct more tests on water at Test Site

Wednesday, Oct. 6, 1999 | 11:56 a.m.

The final independent report on the Department of Energy's ground water plan for Frenchman Flat -- a plan that will lay out how the DOE will clean up decades worth of contamination from nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site -- says the department needs to go back and measure underground radiation before its plan will work.

The report, which criticized the DOE for estimating instead of measuring radiation in the ground water, said computer models created to predict which way the radiation will travel will not work without real measurements.

The experts recommended that the DOE take a step-by-step approach to its effort to create a computer model of ground water behavior at Frenchman Flat and add two new wells to help track the water's flow.

The criticism echoed an early draft of the report that said the DOE did not have enough information to tell which way the water ran underneath the Test Site, a federal facility 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas that is larger than Rhode Island.

A total of 921 nuclear weapons experiments were exploded underground at the site from 1951 until 1992 when President George Bush ordered a nuclear testing moratorium. Some of the weapons exploded at or near the ground water level. Details about radiation released during such experiments are still classified as secret.

The 73-page document produced by six independent experts led by Lynn W. Gelhar, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reviewed four draft technical reports containing more than 1,000 pages.

"The panel has concluded that the model has not yielded a defensible and confident assessment of the likely pattern of contaminant migration over the next 1,000 years at Frenchman Flat," the report said of the DOE's proposed computer model.

The experts also criticized the DOE for not considering alternative ideas about the rocks, soil and ground water under the Test Site. "Such alternative models could involve much more severe consequences in terms of the extent of contaminant migration," the report said.

The DOE's data also failed to predict the rate at which radioactivity will be released from the test cavities, the report said.

The DOE and the state of Nevada are working to monitor radiation that escapes from the cavities at the Test Site after 41 years of Cold War nuclear weapons experiments. There are a total of six locations under study by the DOE and the state for monitoring. Frenchman Flat is located in the southeast section of the site and is the smallest area.

Nevada Division of Environmental Protection project leader Paul Liebendorfer said he had not received a copy of the final review report late Monday.

The state is allowing the DOE to work on its monitoring plan, since many criticisms by Nevada environmental officials matched the expert reviewers' concerns, Liebendorfer said.

"The DOE may have to revise its plan two or three times before we are satisfied," Liebendorfer said.

The DOE's No. 1 priority is to protect public health, DOE spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said. "We've already spent $170 million on this project," she noted, adding that the final report contained minor corrections to the original draft.

In a related development, the U.S. Geological Survey issued a report on Monday that estimates Ash Meadows, west of the Test Site, discharges between 17,616 and 21,283 acre-feet of water each year.

USGS hydrologist Randell Laczniak, the report's author, said that the desert oasis at Ash Meadows probably controls the movement of ground water beneath the Nevada Test Site. The revised estimate will help the DOE determine how fast the ground water is moving under the Test Site, he said.

The USGS calculated how much water evaporates annually from ponds and plants at Ash Meadows to discover the discharge. The lower rate of discharge is based on rainfall levels contributing to the ground water, while the higher rate assumes little or no rainfall, thus drawing more water from the Test Site to Ash Meadows.