EPA draws criticism for moving mobile lab at UNLV

The Environmental Protection Agency has the equipment and experts it needs to decommission four buildings it's been leasing on UNLV's campus for nearly 50 years to conduct research with hazardous and radioactive materials.

Instead, the agency moved its mobile radiation detection gear to Alabama and contracted out the UNLV work for $240,000.

The reason for moving the Mobile Environmental Radiation Laboratory (MERL) was to save $100,000 per year in maintenance work that it now plans to do with staff in Montgomery, Ala.

But it's going to take three years to see a savings on the EPA's ledger.

UNLV chemistry professor Vern Hodge said the EPA's decision to relocate the MERL to Alabama at a time when it could be used to assess contamination in the buildings before they are demolished is "hogwash."

"The EPA has people who could do this. The sample analysis could have been done if the MERL was here, faster and better," he said.

EPA says, however, that the MERL can't handle the job.

"The MERL is an emergency response asset and was not designed to meet a high-volume mission. MERLs can provide on-site analysis for small numbers of samples, but cannot meet the sample throughput demands of this decommissioning project," EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine wrote in an email response to a Las Vegas Review-Journal query.

That's not how Hodge see it.

"None of the EPA's reasons as to why MERL can't do it are valid," he said Tuesday.

Instead of spending $240,000 to contract the work, the MERL could do the same work "at a token cost. The MERL has the liquid scintillation instrument, five fine gamma ray spectrometers, and one 8-at-a-time gas-flow alpha beta analyzer. It'd be hard for a commercial lab to beat the MERL's capability."

He's also concerned that by moving the MERL to Alabama, an emergency response would take longer — three to four days — to reach Las Vegas by the EPA's estimate.

Hodge contends the absence of the mobile lab leaves Nevada, California, Arizona and other Western states without support for a rapid emergency response to handle incidents such as a nuclear power accident, a transportation mishap involving nuclear waste or a terrorist strike involving radioactive materials spread by a so-called "dirty bomb."

EPA spokeswoman Monica Lee said "the move does not impact the nation's ability to respond to a nuclear threat on the West Coast."

"We have made very clear that the mobile lab is not part of the first response efforts, nor is it one of the most important tools EPA would use in responding to radiation threats," Lee said.

"EPA and other federal agencies with responsibilities for emergency response have multiple radiological response assets readily available to respond to incidents on the West Coast, including the majority of EPA's radiological field response team, located in Las Vegas," she said in an email.

In addition to contracting with American Radiation Services for decommissioning work, the EPA spent nearly $5,000 in an "emergency procurement" for contractor Perkin Elmer to remove lead from an instrument that has a radioactive source before the MERL was packed up and hauled to Alabama on July 13.

The agency's public affairs staff is looking into details about the contracts, such as when they were signed and who signed them in response to questions by the Review-Journal, but the information wasn't provided.

Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Follow @KeithRogers2 on Twitter.