Guinn eyes input on hunt for radiation in water

Tuesday, July 25, 2000 | 9:52 a.m.

Gov. Kenny Guinn met Monday with citizen advisers to the Department of Energy on how to search the state's ground water for radiation from underground nuclear weapons explosions at the Nevada Test Site.

Relations between the DOE and the state have been tense over the ground water monitoring program. As Congress wraps up the 2001 federal budgets, the state wants the DOE to ask for more money for ground water tests.

Guinn has asked the DOE to provide $40 million to gather enough information on current ground water conditions. Then the DOE could begin to make educated guesses based on a computer model as to what direction the contaminated water might take.

The DOE has asked Congress to approve $12.7 million for ground water analysis through 2002 at the Test Site. Another $21.4 million in contingency funding for the same period was not requested.

Guinn met with representatives of the Citizens Advisory Board Monday at his Carson City office, his spokesman, Jack Finn, said.

The board members have been concerned about the failure of the DOE's ground water assessment program, said Earle Dixon, technical adviser to the board.

So are state officials, said Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, who attended the meeting.

"The state shared some of those concerns and how best to communicate them to the DOE," Loux said after the closed-door meeting.

Independent scientists about a year ago reviewed the DOE's plan for studying the ground water at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and said there is not enough basic information to find out if radiation contaminates the water or in what direction it might flow.

State environmental officials have been criticizing the DOE's proposed ground water monitoring plan for more than a year.

"We've pretty much drawn the line in the sand," John Walker of the Nevada Division of the Environmental Protection Agency said about the state's request for extra money for ground water monitoring.

When the DOE began its nationwide environmental cleanup efforts at its other sites in 1989, the Nevada site still hosted underground nuclear warhead experiments, he said. "Nevada was not in the forefront of receiving environmental management funds," Walker said.

A total of 828 underground nuclear tests were triggered at the site from 1951 through 1992, with at least 200 of them at or below the water table, according to DOE records.

The DOE has estimated that there are 300 million curies of radiation at the Test Site, with 120 million curies in the ground water from the nuclear experiments. A curie is a measurement of radiation disintegrating from a fraction of an ounce of radium.