Click for printable version
Click to send to a friend

More about Yucca Mountain Click image for an enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson. As Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., listens at right, Citizen Alert Executive Director Kaitlin Backlund discusses a report Friday that criticizes the Department of Energy's strategy for monitoring groundwater at the Nevada Test Site. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Saturday, January 19, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Report critical of groundwater monitoring plan

Environmental group says public won't get adequate warning of pollution from test site

Federal government plans for tracking contamination from hundreds of nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site won't adequately warn the public of risks to the region's groundwater, a statewide environmental group stated Friday in a new study.

The report, conducted by two University of Nevada, Las Vegas scientists for Citizen Alert, was embraced by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. She said it will give state officials more ammunition in their fight against the Department of Energy's plan to construct a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

"This will certainly be a part of the overall strategy," Berkley said at a news conference outside her Las Vegas office, where Citizen Alert officials released portions of the 90-page report. "It doesn't take a brain surgeon ... to realize that these two potential groundwater contamination (areas) are eventually going to collide."

Yucca Mountain is a ridge of volcanic rock on the southwest edge of the test site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. On Jan. 10, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced his intention to recommend the site be developed into a repository. The mountain eventually would entomb some 77,000 tons of the nation's most lethal nuclear waste, mostly spent fuel from commercial power reactors.

Berkley wrote Abraham in November, pointing out the potentially dangerous situation that would exist if nuclear waste was put in the path of uncontained, radiation-contaminated groundwater that scientists believe is moving through a 300-square-mile swath of the test site. She said the combined effects from waste at Yucca Mountain and the test site's existing contamination have the potential for violating federal radiation safety standards set for Yucca Mountain, in addition to making the test site a candidate for Superfund cleanup funding.

Berkley said Friday she is asking "our beloved secretary of energy" to have federal scientists determine how the test site's contamination will affect groundwater at Yucca Mountain. She also wants more monitoring wells installed near Pahute Mesa to serve as an early warning system, as the new Citizen Alert report suggests.

Such a move should help characterize at least one contamination plume to find out how big it is, how fast it is moving and what radioactive materials are in it, said physicist Dennis Weber, who co-authored the report with his UNLV colleague Earle Dixon.

"Without that information, we don't know how to put up an early warning system," Weber said.

Carl Gertz, director of test site environmental management for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a branch of the Energy Department, said his staff is concerned about contamination from nuclear tests, but they have no plans to characterize a plume as the report suggests. Other testing is planned where the plumes intersect, he said.

He noted that if state environmental officials suggest characterizing a contamination plume "we would be open to it. We haven't excluded the possibility. It just isn't in our current plans today," Gertz said.

He said federal scientists have installed 31 monitoring wells less than a half-mile from ground zero of some of the tests.

"That has provided us lots of data. We believe it's important to understand the entire contributions of all the (nuclear test) shots and their cumulative effect on groundwater," he said.

The report by Weber and Dixon, however, states the strategy Gertz's staff is following wouldn't produce a warning soon enough. And the goal to protect the public from contaminated groundwater with a carefully placed network of monitoring wells can't be accomplished without distinguishing at least one contamination plume.

"We see the goal of providing an early warning to the public as a possibly urgent matter," states the report, which indicates the existing system has only a 28 percent chance of detecting contamination "at some time by any of the wells."

"These wells were designed to obtain hydrological data, not to serve as an efficient early warning system," Weber and Dixon wrote.

"Since contaminants already have been migrating for over 40 years, it does not make sense to wait until 2030 to finish installing an early warning system, as the DOE plans," they wrote.

By characterizing a plume in the Pahute Mesa area, a subsequent system of a few early warning wells could be installed at strategic locations much sooner and at a fraction of the cost the Energy Department already has spent, the new report states.

"After DOE has consumed over $200 million, we still don't have the basic information necessary to establish whether a plume will reach Oasis Valley in 12 or 500 years. Both predictions have been made in the past," the report said.

"At about $2 million each, the cost of the wells to characterize one plume may be $24 million. To us, that is cheap for the information that would be gained when compared with the $200 million."

The report's findings align with a key recent recommendation from a peer review of the federal scientists' work. Last week, that panel suggested Energy Department scientists determine where plumes of radioactive groundwater merge at the test site.

The contamination stems from nuclear weapons tests conducted between 1957 and 1992. In all, there were 908 detonations at 878 different depths and locations in what Energy Department officials have identified as 828 below-ground nuclear tests.

Scientists expect that tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, could be the first of long list of radionuclides to reach public drinking water supplies beyond the test site, although no radioactive remnants of the tests have been detected off site.