Study attacks DOE monitoring of radioactive water

Friday, Jan. 18, 2002 | 9:36 a.m.

The Department of Energy is failing to monitor ground water contaminated with radiation as a result of underground nuclear experiments, according to a study released Thursday.

The study sponsored by Citizen Alert, an environmental organization that strongly opposes a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, focuses on Pahute Mesa in the northwest corner of the Nevada Test Site.

The mesa was the site of 82 underground nuclear blasts from 1957 through 1992, some of them equal to a million tons of TNT.

"We do not claim to have produced 'the truth' with respect to the early-warning network scenario, but we claim to have sufficient evidence to support the argument that DOE has never tried to characterize, and therefore, to understand, the contamination from about 82 underground detonations beneath Pahute Mesa," the report said.

The Test Site's boundary is 17 miles northeast of Oasis Valley. In 1993 a DOE report said water contaminated with radiation could reach the valley in 30 years.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who has called for a cleanup of contaminated ground water at the site, said the DOE has not considered the combined radiation produced from the weapons tests and waste buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain repository.

"This underlines in a dramatic way the dangers of storing high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain," Berkley spokesman Michael O'Donovan said Thursday.

Hydrologist and report author Dennis Weber of the Harry Reid Environmental Research Center says the DOE has failed to sample 268 underground bomb cavities to determine how far and how fast radiation is moving in the ground water.

"Information from a single plume could tell the DOE whether the contamination is wide, narrow or scattered," he said. Since the DOE would know the date of the experiment, it could track how fast the radiation is moving, he said.

It was the second report in two weeks that has been critical of DOE efforts to dig a series of wells that would warn people in nearby rural communities when contaminated water leaves the Test Site.

Scientists for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute for Regulatory Science on Jan. 9 said the DOE hasn't collected enough information to sufficiently track ground water contamination.

The DOE had no comment on the latest study, spokesman Kevin Rohrer said.