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Friday, February 04, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Protesters arrested at Nevada Test Site
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Nine anti-nuclear activists were arrested early Thursday at the Nevada Test Site in a civil disobedience action targeting a weapons materials experiment by government scientists, authorities said.
Energy Department spokesman Darwin Morgan said the nine were among 13 who gathered at the Mercury entrance to the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California prepared to detonate small amounts of plutonium to learn how it holds up after aging in the stockpile.
They were all cited for trespassing by Nye County sheriff's deputies and released, Morgan said.
He said the experiment, Oboe 3, was detonated at 2:16 p.m. as planned in a below-ground complex.
It was the ninth of its kind since July 2, 1992, when the Energy Department launched a program to support scientific knowledge about nuclear materials in the absence of full-scale weapons tests. Full-scale tests have been on hold since 1992.
The "subcritical" experiments are designed to stop short of erupting into nuclear chain reactions. They show scientists, who capture the event by high-tech photography, how materials such as plutonium blow apart when shocked from the force of high-explosives.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, protesters rallied against Bechtel, the parent company of Bechtel Nevada, the test site's prime contractor.
The San Francisco gathering was sponsored by Tri-Valley Communities Against A Radioactive Environment, a Livermore lab watchdog group.
Organizer Marylia Kelly said as many as 40 protesters from a number of anti-nuclear groups handed out information to Bechtel employees and wrote the names of nuclear tests in street chalk outside the company.
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