Rural Nevadans concerned about radioactive water

Wednesday, Sept. 8, 1999 | 10:40 a.m.

Nevada's rural residents are raising new concerns about possible radioactive contamination in their drinking water from the Nevada Test Site, where underground nuclear experiments exploded for 41 years.

The quality of the ground water has rarely been a topic of conversation at local diners in Nevada's rural communities, but one resident says now she hears her neighbors talking about it all the time.

A recent scientific review that criticizes the DOE's approach to tracking ground water from Frenchman Flat at the Nevada Test Site, where above-ground and underground nuclear explosions took place from 1951 until 1992, has gotten their attention.

The studies, designed to see which way radiation from the nuclear testing is traveling through the ground water, cannot detect the direction the contaminated water is flowing or how far the contamination has spread.

That's started making residents in nearby counties nervous.

Stephanie Lawton, who lives in Esmeralda County smack in the middle of Nevada, said she has heard ranchers statewide and residents of Beatty, the former site of a commercial low-level radioactive landfill, express fears that their drinking and irrigation water may become contaminated.

"It's something when people in Beatty are concerned about what's in their drinking water," Lawton said last week, because many of them worked at the low-level nuclear waste site that closed in 1993. In the late 1980s U.S. Geological Survey scientists discovered radiation from the dump had traveled 300 feet beneath the unlined pits into the ground water and moved to close the site.

Lawton was in Las Vegas for a meeting of the Citizens Advisory Board, a panel formed to act as a liaison between the public and the DOE on environmental cleanup issues at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. She is a member of the panel.

Bob Bangerter, the DOE's underground water monitoring program manager, said the federal agency is taking the public concerns seriously.

Although the scientific review of the Frenchman Flat plan is not final, the DOE is already considering how it will do the missing scientific work noted by a panel of independent experts, Bangerter said.

Physicist Dennis Weber of the Harry Reid Research Center at UNLV was a member of the scientific review panel. "The people on the panel are what I would call gurus," Weber said of the other five experts led by civil and environmental engineer Lynn Gelhar of MIT.