A Pentagon agency has told some members of Congress that plans for the massive, non-nuclear Divine Strake blast are back on track for the Nevada Test Site after weighing alternative sites in New Mexico, Utah, California and Indiana.
It would be too costly and time-consuming to prepare these sites for the test, which defense planners say is the final validation of "targeting tools" for U.S. weapons to defeat deeply buried bunkers where weapons of mass destruction could be stored, according to a copy of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's presentation.
Advertisement
The agency said its director, James Tegnelia, met Wednesday with Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and others in Utah's delegation.
Members of Nevada's delegation didn't attend the briefing, and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she wasn't invited.
Berkley said she doubted for a number of reasons that the test will ever be conducted at the Nevada Test Site, where environmentalists fear the blast could send a mushroom cloud downwind laced with radioactive remnants from past above-ground tests and some below-ground nuclear tests.
"They haven't reached the first hurdle yet," Berkley said in a telephone interview Thursday from Washington, D.C. "They are no further along today than they were six months ago."
She noted that she has "no assurance this test will be safe. ... If they think they are going to slip this through they are sadly mistaken."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., previously supported the blast, for which a 36-foot pit has been dug to hold the ammonium nitrate slurry near a ridge top at the test site, 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
But on Thursday Reid said he was reconsidering his position on Divine Strake.
He said he had not been presented with the Pentagon's new information that supports conducting the blast in Nevada.
"I was somebody who didn't object much in the past, but I am beginning to get a little worried about this, with the big mushroom cloud," Reid said. "I am not a big fan of it anymore. I don't know what would be in that cloud."
The agency had considered conducting the 700-ton, ammonium-nitrate and fuel-oil blast at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico or Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds or at China Lake, Calif. Agency planners, however, determined it would cost $100 million at each site or $10 million for a smaller scale test in a limestone quarry near Mitchell, Ind. Instead, the blast, priced at $23 million, could be accomplished in a year or less for only $5 million more at the Nevada Test Site.
Pentagon planners claim the test is needed because existing "targeting tools" are more than 30 years old and "are imprecise," according to their presentation to the Utah delegation. They expect to issue a revised environmental assessment in early December with a public information session in mid-December followed by a 30-day comment period with a decision on whether or not to proceed by mid-January.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, a branch of the Department of Energy that runs the test site, is in the process of conducting an environmental assessment to determine if Divine Strake can be conducted safely, said NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan.
As the host agency, he said the NNSA must demonstrate for state environmental officials that the blast won't exceed air quality limits or violate conditions of its air permit.
Morgan said he can't predict a time frame for completing the environmental tasks.
Opponents of the open-pit detonation, which would deliver shock waves equal to a magnitude-3 earthquake through a limestone tunnel at the test site, say they will continue to fight the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in court and pressure Congress to not allow it.
Originally planned for June 2, it was pushed to June 23 after some members of the Winnemucca Indian Colony and some downwinders in Nye County and Utah took legal action to force the government to show that the blast and its mushroom cloud would not disperse radioactive materials.
The National Nuclear Security Administration withdrew its revised finding of no significant impact on May 26, and the test was delayed indefinitely.
Robert Hager, the Reno attorney representing the plaintiffs, said Thursday, "I thought this project had been sent to boondoggle heaven where it belongs.
"This is the worst place in the world to create a mushroom cloud, and the government knows that," Hager said. "I'm not surprised that they waited until after the election to show their cards and that the winds of change didn't blow through Nevada like they did in the rest of the country."
Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of the statewide environmental group, Citizen Alert, said, "It's not going to happen because we're going to stop it. We are going to be demanding a full-blown environmental impact statement."
Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault contributed to this report.
