Tons of plutonium taint NTS

Monday, Oct. 23, 2000 | 11:55 a.m.

The Energy Department has admitted for the first time that nuclear weapons explosions released four tons of plutonium into Nevada Test Site soils over four decades.

A sphere of plutonium the size of a softball, weighing a few pounds, can create a single nuclear weapon.

"That's a lot of plutonium," Arjun Makhijan, Institute of Energy and Environmental Research director, said today.

The DOE revealed the amount in response to an institute study published three years ago that questioned the agency's reports on the amount of contamination released during nuclear testing. The institute is a private environmental center.

The figure is an estimate of the radioactive contamination released by the bombs at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The amount of plutonium and other radioactive elements used to make the bombs is top secret.

The DOE added in its response Friday that new information may push that estimate up 10 percent.

DOE officials said there is no immediate threat to people or the environment from the plutonium or other elements that are heavier than uranium.

However, government experts have estimated that radiation would not reach ground water at the Test Site for up to 10,000 years. But a 1998 DOE research team discovered plutonium almost a mile from a 1968 underground blast and concluded that it traveled on water molecules called colloids.

The DOE reviewed six sites nationwide from the institute's study as part of the response sent to Makhijani on Friday.

"I believe it is the first time we have had an official response," Makhijani said in a telephone interview.

The next step for the DOE, according to Carolyn Huntoon, assistant energy secretary for environmental management, is to ask the National Academy of Sciences, an independent review agency, to examine the department's latest technique to measure radiation.

"Historically, those wastes have been considered irretrievable except by extraordinary means," Huntoon wrote about the buried weapons' contamination. DOE's policy is to monitor the site and take action if a threat to people or the environment occurs.

"We believe that approach remains sound," Huntoon said.

The new information from DOE raises questions about the safety of burying 77,000 tons of highly radioactive wastes from commercial power reactors at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, said Anthony Hechanova, a nuclear engineer at UNLV's Harry Reid Environmental Research Center.

The Harry Reid Center, under Hechanova's guidance, has proposed studying how fast radioactive elements move through the Test Site's soils before any scientific review begins to place highly radioactive wastes into Yucca. The DOE is reviewing the proposed project.

A speck of plutonium will not harm a person unless it is inhaled, which can cause lung cancer, or ingested. Plutonium remains dangerously radioactive for half a million years

The DOE surveyed its records at six sites after Makhijani's report. Besides the Test Site, other sites included Hanford, Wash., the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Idaho Falls, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Savannah River near Aiken, S.C.

One site not included because it was a commercial low-level nuclear waste dump was in Beatty, about 110 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In 1998 the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, revealed that 47 pounds of plutonium had been buried at the defunct dump from 1962 until the state closed it in 1993.

Before that, the U.S. Geological Survey discovered tritium, a radioactive element from nuclear weapons that dissolves easily, in ground water almost 300 feet beneath the Beatty site.

The tritium had reached ground water in less than 40 years. Government experts had estimated it would take at least 5,000 years for it to reach ground water there.