Henderson firm helped feds build nuke arsenal

Monday, Sept. 11, 2000 | 11:14 a.m.

Titanium Metals Corp. of Henderson was hired in 1959 by a government contractor to test a process for extracting uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

The six-month contract was one of hundreds struck nationwide with private companies, plants and mills hired to help the federal government build the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Titanium Metals contract came to light in a USA Today series of articles published last week based on recently declassified contracts from the Department of Energy. National Lead Co., a prime government nuclear weapons contractor, subcontracted the Henderson plant.

Timet was named in the article as one of the plants in the country where workers might have been exposed to radioactivity.

Neither state of Nevada nor Timet officials knew of the contract when the Sun contacted them on Friday. Contamination from heavy metals and solvents has been found in evaporation ponds at Timet. A cleanup effort has been under way for two years.

However, the use of uranium at the site does not appear to have caused significant environmental contamination. Low levels of radioactivity have been found in the ground water near the plant, but scientists who are charged with monitoring the area have not pinpointed the source.

"We need to get to the bottom of it and find out the scale of the project," Craig Wilkinson, Timet's manager for health, safety and environmental affairs, said.

Among the 100,000 declassified documents USA Today uncovered, only one mentioned Timet: Purchase Order No. 95902 spelled out the Henderson company's task to conduct a feasibility study and fabricate an electrolysis process using a mixture of magnesium fluoride and 5 percent uranium. Electrolysis destroys unwanted chemicals using electricity.

No one inside or outside the government can say whether the radioactive and toxic materials used in the private contracts are a public health and safety concern. Not enough information is available on the amounts of material used and the techniques used to process them, officials said.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, state Division of Environmental Protection and Basic Environmental Inc., a subsidiary of the industrial complex charged with its cleanup, have tested the soils and ground water at Timet for the past 20 years and have found low levels of uranium and thorium.

Neither the company nor state regulators have considered the slight radioactivity in the soils a threat to public health.

"Uranium in the soils is not driving the cleanup efforts," Robin Bain, Basic Environmental's project manager, said.

Experts always assumed the radioactive materials occurred naturally in local soils, though a small amount of uranium is contained in the rutile ore processed at the plant for titanium.

Officials have done general measurements of the radioactivity in the soils and water, but they have not done more detailed tests that would reveal for certain whether the source of radiation was natural or man-made.

Of greater concern to environmental officials have been levels of rocket fuel booster perchlorate, pesticides and benzene coming from the Basic Management Inc. complex in Henderson.

Timet is one of the four industrial companies at the BMI complex ordered by the state to remove tons of soils laced with solvents, chemicals and other toxins.

Basic Environmental Inc., a subsidiary of BMI, was created to lead the state-ordered cleanup. Bain said she had no idea whether uranium used at the plant could have gotten into the ground water.

State environmental officials are still studying the ground water running from the industrial site to see how much of it reaches the Las Vegas Wash, leading to Lake Mead, which is the main drinking water source for Southern Nevada.

Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Administrator Allen Biaggi said he would review each document that Timet had submitted in the past decade as part of the cleanup order to determine if any mentioned uranium or the National Lead agreement. He said he did not recall seeing such a document.

Most weapons work with private companies ended in the late 1950s, when the federal government began to operate its own facilities, such as the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor of today's Department of Energy, opened the Nevada Operations Office at the Test Site in 1962, though more than 1,000 tests were conducted at the site from 1951 through 1992.

At the time of the Henderson contract, National Lead operated the Fernald, Ohio, uranium processing facility for the federal government. The uranium was used to fuel thousands of nuclear weapons. Fernald now ships thousands of tons of low-level nuclear waste from its former operation to the Test Site for burial.