Letter: Pressure on DOE needed to solve water problems

Friday, April 14, 2000 | 9:49 a.m.

With the Department of Energy's ground-water monitoring program at the Nevada Test Site in the spotlight recently, the time is ripe for our political leaders to place a higher priority on existing NTS ground-water contamination.

One DOE program routinely contaminated the ground water, without concern, over the course of several decades. Now another proposes to add more contamination to the ground water.

Simple logic suggests the possibility of cumulative impacts and an urgent need to find and characterize the existing radioactive ground-water contamination at NTS. The discovery of contaminated ground water from nuclear testing near Yucca Mountain could also complicate the DOE's repository licensing process.

The impacts from our existing contamination must be understood before we soberly attempt to assuage ourselves that we have the ability and confidence to site another source of radiation at the NTS, with no adverse consequences. When you consider DOE's success in defining the current contamination, the chances for accurate predictions thousands of years out in the future seem very remote indeed.

It's time for more public and political pressure on DOE to more accurately identify the extent and location of the hydrologic contamination at NTS, including the direction and speed of its movement. Achieving that understanding may provide vital information about the real impacts of future contamination from Yucca Mountain and support for the long-held Nevada position that the NTS geology and ground-water system are not so ideally suited for nuclear waste isolation.

Let's just make sure we go about the process properly. Otherwise, the time and money spent doing it will end up like our ground-water resources -- laid to waste.

RICK NIELSEN

Editor's note: The writer is a member of Citizen Alert and is an environmental activist.