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Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009 | 3:01 p.m.
Scientists have found radioactive tritium from nuclear tests in Nevada contaminating groundwater off the Nevada Test Site for the first time.
However, state and federal studies indicated the contaminated groundwater would leave the nuclear site within 50 years.
A groundwater sample taken in a new well drilled on Air Force land contained tritium at about 12,500 picocuries per liter, below the federal Environmental Protection Agency Safe Drinking Water Act limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter. A picocurrie is a measure of radiation in liquid.
The Energy Department predicted in February that groundwater contamination would leave the Test Site boundary near Pahute Mesa, in the northwest corner of the sprawling site about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The nearest public water source to the new government test well, completed Oct. 12, is 14 miles away.
Tritium occurred naturally in lakes, rivers and public water supplies at between 5 and 25 picocuries per liter before nuclear weapons testing began in 1945 in New Mexico. Tritium is formed in nature from cosmic rays striking hydrogen. It is produced in nuclear explosions as well.
Current plans are to drill six more test wells on and near Pahute Mesa over the next two to three years, said Darwin Morgan, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the Test Site for the Energy Department.
These future wells will be drilled as part of the Energy Department's extensive groundwater monitoring program. They will go down about 3,500 feet at a cost of about $5 million each.
The groundwater monitoring program includes well drilling, sample collection, analysis and evaluation, and computer modeling to better monitor the extent and nature of groundwater contamination at the Test Site, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The first nuclear experiment on western Pahute Mesa occurred in 1966. In total, the government tested 1,021 nuclear devices above and below ground at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1992.
Hey, how about an estimate when it's going to hit Lake Mead? A little news you can use.
Good Question. The answer can be very simple. The entire NTS is in a different basin than Lake Mead. Water from Pahute Mesa (to the far northwest of the test site), would first flow down past Beatty, down through Amargosa, then to Ash Meadows and maybe around the mountains to Death Valley. No one knows for sure, that even that could take hundreds of thousands of years and tritium has a half life of 12.32 years. It is below EPA standards now, so don't get too worried about the tritium from the NTS. Worry more about a gasoline tanker overturning near one of the LV washes and it making it to Lake Mead at levels way over the drinking water limits.
I know that the "everything nuclear is bad crowd" will want to ignore the very real threat posed by necessary products (e.g. gasoline) involved in accidents on our very dangerous roads in LV, and try to focus us to immpossible scenarios like an explosive volcano erupting on the test site, spewing radioactive water into the air that then rains out in Lake Mead and destroys LV, LA, and most of California. That has already been published in a novel. Good science fiction -- not so realistic science.
All Nuclear & Hydro power plants should be shut down and dismantled for the sake of the environment and our children.
Signed; Obamas Clean Coal Coalition.