Editorial: More tests of water needed

Monday, Jan. 21, 2002 | 9:03 a.m.

From 1951 until 1992, when President Bush ordered a moratorium on nuclear testing, 921 nuclear weapons were detonated underground at the Nevada Test Site. The tests also contaminated some of the ground water at the Test Site, but exactly where that radioactive water is located -- and, equally important, in which direction it is moving -- has been a mystery. The Department of Energy had been using computer models to try to predict which way the water was headed, but a team of independent scientists in 1999 said it was no match for taking real measurements, so they called on the DOE to drill more wells to test the water.

In the past two weeks organizations have called on the U.S. Department of Energy to dramatically step up its testing of contaminated ground water between the Test Site, where the detonations occurred, and nearby communities. The department says that it has dug 12 shallow wells in Oasis Valley, north of Beatty and southwest of the Test Site, and also has dug an additional six wells on Air Force land closer to the Test Site. But that simply isn't enough and more wells should be drilled, according to independent scientists from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute for Regulator Science, who were joined later by Citizens Alert, an environmental group that opposes the construction of a nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

The Department of Energy hasn't devoted enough attention to this problem, and the contaminated ground water isn't a matter confined to just the Test Site. There also are implications for the Yucca Mountain project, as Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has noted. The Department of Energy hasn't adequately taken into account the combined radiation produced from the weapons tests and waste buried at a proposed nuclear waste dump nearby at Yucca Mountain in determining the mountain's suitability.

The federal government should place a priority on the testing of ground water at the Nevada Test Site. There no longer are atomic tests, but a dangerous legacy lives on in the form of radioactive-contaminated water. The U.S. government conducted these tests that forever scarred the environment; now that same government has an obligation to determine exactly where that water is moving so that the public isn't in harm's way.