Atomic legacy: Test Site museum will preserve history of nuclear experiments

Friday, July 5, 2002 | 9:09 a.m.

Those who wonder what it was like living in Las Vegas when atomic bombs burst into mushroom clouds less than 100 miles away will be able to experience some of those sights and sounds by the end of next year.

The Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation has broken ground at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on a museum that will capture a unique and controversial piece of Southern Nevada history, keeping it from slipping into obscurity.

The $12.3 million museum, funded through a combination of federal and state money and private donations, is expected to open in October 2003 at Flamingo Road and Swenson Street. Part of that funding was supposed to come from a special license plate that featured a mushroom cloud and the words Nevada Test Site, but the cancellation of the plate has instead given the museum a cloud of controversy.

"I was surprised," Nevada Test Site Museum Foundation Chairman Troy Wade said of the Department of Motor Vehicle's decision. The plate, designed by Northern Nevada resident Richard Bibbero, was prominently displayed during the May debate on Yucca Mountain in the House of Representatives.

In early June the license plate design was dropped. Ginny Lewis, chief of the Nevada Department of Transportation, said the design had created controversy and was insensitive to the times.

The financial support could still come. The foundation will decide on a new plate design later this summer -- after the Yucca Mountain debate is finished in Congress, Wade said.

In the meantime the foundation announced last week that it had received a $500,000 donation from Dorothy Grier in the name of her late husband Herbert E. Grier, a nuclear scientist and co-founder of longtime Test Site contractor EG&G. The Scientific Discovery and Innovation Gallery will be named for Grier.

That will be only one of many features of the museum, which will focus attention on the Nevada Test Site, one of the most secret battlegrounds of the Cold War.

The stark Southern Nevada desert shook for 41 years as 928 nuclear weapons exploded in the air and beneath the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Department of Energy stopped nuclear weapons experiments in 1992.

The museum is a dream of former Test Site workers who didn't want its legacy to be forgotten. They formed the foundation on April 15, 1998.

"The NTS Historical Foundation didn't have anything but grand plans and dreams, not a penny," Wade said.

Once the foundation announced its intentions, the idea of a museum drew support from places and people the foundation members never expected to show an interest, Wade said.

For example, state Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, a nuclear testing critic and a staunch foe of the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, gave her support for the museum.

Las Vegas Sun Executive Editor Mike O'Callaghan, a former two-term governor, also supported the museum in his newspaper column.

The Smithsonian Institution was so intrigued by the idea that it granted the museum affiliate status before a site was selected, Wade said.

The proposed three-story, 63,000-square-foot building ultimately will include research laboratories, said Peter Ross, director of campus planning and facilities manager at the Desert Research Institute.

A history of nuclear weapons experiments will be revealed in displays.

Without leaving Las Vegas, those visiting the museum can immerse themselves in a virtual tour of the Test Site.

Visitors entering the museum will receive a "security pass," reminiscent of a film badge that measured radiation exposure on each person received before passing the checkpoint to enter the Test Site.

Beyond gazing at glass cases filled with memorabilia, museum visitors will see and hear the flavor of the 1950s and 1960s when the Test Site was the second largest employer in Nevada. Mining was the state's leading industry then.

In the Ground Zero Theater, museum visitors can watch films of the above-ground tests.

Eyewitness accounts of observers of above-ground explosions also will be told.

"It was an indescribable sight -- the huge fireball seemed to be right above us, with every color of the rainbow," Army combat infantryman Jack Roeder said, describing one shot in the early 1950s. "Everyone was silent."

Visitors also can learn basic physics principles involved in a nuclear explosion.

Or listen to a radio program that might have come from a local station in the '50s, filled with period music, political speeches and news from Las Vegas.

A section devoted to nuclear rocket experiments also is planned. Many of the exhibits will be interactive.

"I can't tell you how much time we're putting into this," Wade said, "but it is a labor of love."

But the area had a history long before bombs started exploding there. Artifacts from 17 Western Indian tribes from Southern California to Washington state from as far back as 11,000 years have been found there, which will be included in the museum.

The area also played host to ranching and mining activities long before the government selected the site in 1950, and artifacts from those years also will be on display.

Once the museum opens, the foundation will begin work on the planned Nevada Atomic Testing History Institute next door, which will house decades of records on nuclear testing for use by scholars and historians.

The records -- more than a million documents -- currently are housed inside a building in North Las Vegas that is bulging at the seams, Wade said.

Nevada and the United States will not lose this important and once-secret history, said Stephen Wells, president of Desert Research Institute.

"It is a duty of an academic institution to make the information available to its citizens," Wells said.

In addition to 368,000 documents housed in the North Las Vegas facility, Dey said that the DOE has more than 1 million film badges that recorded radiation exposure.