Report says cleanup of Test Site impossible

Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2000 | 11:34 a.m.

The Nevada Test Site is one of 109 federal government locations used to build nuclear bombs that a scientific committee said will never be clean enough to allow public access to the land.

In a National Academy of Sciences report released Monday, a scientific committee said that rapid growth in the Las Vegas Valley may one day cause local officials to search for water around the site, where the extent of radioactive contamination is unknown.

That means the DOE must take a long look at the future of the Test Site and the other 108 locations, the report said. In addition, it said, "projections of future land uses and the views of members of the public must receive careful consideration."

The DOE must consider local economic, political and environmental factors in its approach to the future of places such as the Test Site, the report said.

"At many sites, radiological and nonradiological hazardous wastes will remain, posing risks to humans and the environment for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years," the report said. "Complete elimination of unacceptable risks to humans and the environment will not be achieved, now or in the foreseeable future."

The DOE commissioned the report about a year ago after forming a nationwide agency on long-term stewardship to address such "national sacrifice zones."

While the government can declare such places as the Test Site permanently closed to the public, the DOE does not have the technology, money and management techniques to prevent the contamination from spreading, the report said. In the case of the Test Site, 928 above-ground and underground nuclear weapons experiments contaminated both the soils and the water.

Thomas Leschine, chairman of the committee that wrote the report, said site managers could use barbed wire and post guards at sites. However, the Test Site is larger than the state of Rhode Island, posing a physical challenge to secure it.

"There's no assurance that we can maintain any of that control," said Leschine, an associate professor in the School of Marine Affairs at the University of Washington. "It's one thing to put a fence up around something, but it's really something else to maintain it in perpetuity."

The extent of the Test Site's contamination is still unknown. Besides the Test Site, areas in Northern Nevada and Central Nevada, where safety experiments on nuclear weapons took place, are also considered contaminated in perpetuity.

Independent scientists said two years ago that the DOE failed to build workable ground water computer models for Frenchman Flat in the southeast corner of the Test Site and for Pahute Mesa in the northwest corner.

Gov. Kenny Guinn has asked the DOE to provide $40 million more a year to determine the extent of the ground water contamination.

The report cited an example of DOE's institutional controls breaking down at its facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The DOE sold land near Oak Ridge in the early 1990s for a golf course, stipulating that the ground water was contaminated and could not be used. "Within a few years, however, the DOE discovered that a well was being drilled to irrigate the golf course," the report said.

The DOE's Gerald G. Boyd, deputy assistant secretary for science and technology, said that the agency is making plans to ensure contamination does not spread, and if it does, the department will correct it. Boyd's agency is leading the cleanup efforts at 144 sites, including those that will never be publicly accessible.

While the DOE has accelerated cleanup efforts and tried to reduce costs and minimize risks, a perfect cleanup is not possible, he said.

The report said that no plan written now to minimize the spread of uncontained wastes would stand up over the tens, hundreds or even thousands of years that many of the contaminants would remain dangerous.

In addition to urging the department to assume engineered barriers like concrete and steel will fail, the report noted that most of what is known about behavior of contaminants in air, water or soil might "eventually be proven wrong." The DOE needs a plan that "actively seeks out and applies new knowledge."

The report also said that too little information is available about most sites to decide whether they could be cleaned up.