DOE signs new plan to monitor NTS contamination

Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1999 | 11:37 a.m.

The Department of Energy has signed an agreement with the state to monitor radioactive contamination at the Nevada Test Site, but federal officials admit that they may not have the basic information they need to do the job.

The agreement, signed last week, is the DOE's fourth plan to investigate how radiation from 30 years of nuclear weapons training is traveling through the ground at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The first three plans were rejected by the state.

Even this fourth attempt received criticism from the state officials charged with approving it, but they recommended its approval so that the DOE would at least be able to get started.

The monitoring is the first step the DOE must take before it cleans up radioactive residue at the Test Site, where nuclear weapons were exploded above and below ground from 1951 to 1992.

The agency plans to begin with a small portion of the site that is larger than the state of Connecticut -- an area known as Frenchman Flat, at the southeast corner of the Test Site.

But a DOE spokeswoman said time and money may hamper the federal agency's efforts to study the Test Site's ground water.

The DOE has begun monitoring efforts with eight wells dug in a row at Frenchman Flat, from which its scientists have built a computer model for future tracking of radiation movement. However, because the wells are in a row instead of scattered randomly, they have come under fire by an independent panel of ground water experts and state officials of the Bureau of Federal Facilities, which is charged with overseeing the monitoring.

The wells should be looking for a plume -- a pattern in which the radiation is moving through the ground away from a bomb crater. Such a plume would have a pattern similar to smoke dissipating in the air. Critics say a computer model based on samples from a row of wells will not detect such a pattern.

After the state reviewed DOE's fourth plan to investigate the desert flat's ground water , Paul Liebendorfer, the state's Bureau of Federal Facilities chief said the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection still had "fundamental concerns" regarding the proposal.

In addition to a lack of information, the state is concerned that the DOE cannot predict how fast or how far the contamination will spread. The DOE set a goal of forecasting radioactive travel in ground water for 1,000 years.

The Test Site is so complex, understanding the rocks and soils and how water flows through them "vary greatly from one location to the next," Liebendorfer wrote to Runore Wycoff, DOE's director of environmental restoration on Sept. 21.

The state has accepted only a plan to begin, but it could still reject the DOE's ultimate plan for monitoring radiation in ground water from Frenchman Flat, Liebendorfer said.

The state will wait for the final scientific review of its computer model to make that decision.

The DOE, meanwhile, is waiting for Congress to approve its budget, which has been relatively small for environmental cleanup at the Nevada Test Site, DOE Nevada Operations spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said.

Of 10 DOE sites on the national environmental cleanup list, the Test Site ranks last for receiving such funds. The Nevada Operations Office asked for $90 million in 1998, but received around $70 million for the past two years. Not only does the DOE have to clean up the Test Site, it must also mop up radioactive and chemical wastes from Mississippi, Colorado, New Mexico and Alaska from Cold War nuclear weapons work.