Editorial: Step up tests for radiation

Monday, March 27, 2000 | 9:28 a.m.

Once again there is another report that radiation has been found in ground water just outside the boundaries of the Nevada Test Site. As the Sun's Mary Manning reported in a story Friday, the type of radiation discovered was tritium, which could either be naturally occurring or, more ominously, the radioactive contamination could be from nuclear bombs.

The Department of Energy believes that this most recent discovery is radiation caused by nature. Separately, Nye County reported that it recently had found high levels of radiation in a test well, but subsequently it was found that the radiation came from natural sources. It is hoped that this most recent revelation turns out to be a false alarm, too. Still, no matter what the final findings are, there still is a genuine concern about radioactive contamination, which scientists always have believed would occur at the Nevada Test Site. The key question, though, is whether radiation from decades of atomic testing can migrate through the ground water and travel beyond the Test Site's boundaries.

The federal government's failure to track and chart this radioactive contamination is an embarrassment. Don't forget that last year a highly respected group of scientists, led by Lynn Gelhar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contended that the DOE's monitoring of radiation didn't contain enough information to accurately predict the level of contamination or the direction it was heading from the southeast corner of the Test Site.

Unfortunately what too often has been the case is a dismissive demeanor to any suggestions that more testing be done. Illustrative are the comments made recently by Carl Gertz, the DOE's assistant manager for environmental management. Gertz told the New York Times last week that new wells might not necessarily be cost effective. "Do you put a well every five miles?" Gertz asked. "We have a site bigger than the state of Rhode Island. To go down to 6,000 feet, where we think you have to go in the northern part of our site, they're about $2 million a well. What is the appropriate cost to taxpayers?"

Despite Gertz's callous assessment, the fact is that more testing is required. What is needed is a commitment by the DOE to seek more funding from Congress to increase the monitoring of possible radioactive contamination. This isn't isolated to just the Test Site. State officials and and scientists are worried that if radioactive water is traveling through ground water there, this raises disturbing questions about the federal government's plans to build a repository at nearby Yucca Mountain, which would store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. The implications are frightening and demand a serious response by the federal government.