Study Finds Extensive A-Test Site Pollution

The U.S. Department of Energy released a draft report Friday saying that 3,000 acres of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site are contaminated with radioactive or other hazardous wastes and the cleanup of both surface and subsurface areas would cost $232 million over a seven-year period.

The somber report on the pollution status of the desert test site, 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, prompted a rebuke of the federal agency from a spokesman for Gov. Robert Miller. The spokesman questioned whether the record of the Energy Department at the test s ite justifies any confidence by the state that the agency should be entrusted with a proposed underground nuclear waste repository nearby.

“We have to be cautious and deliberate in dealing with the Department of Energy,” said Miller’s press secretary, Larry Henry. “They have not complied with environmental standards at the test site. Yet at the same time, they want a blank check at Yucca Mountain (the repository site).”

The Energy Department report released in Washington was labeled a “predecisional draft,” but a nearly identical final version is expected to be released later this month.

It noted that 680 nuclear tests have been held at the test site in the last 40 years--until 1963, many of them above ground--and that a large amount of radioactive and other hazardous wastes have been produced there.

“There are 777 release sites being handled in the Nevada Environmental Restoration Program,” the report noted.

Among the phases of the program are development and implementation of closure plans for numerous sites, installation of monitoring wells to analyze ground water and cleanup of industrial sites and large surface areas.

The surface cleanup will require new technology, the report said without elaboration.

It projected cleanup operation spending at $1.5 million in fiscal 1989; $3.1 million, fiscal 1990; $15.4 million, 1991; $18.5, million, 1992; $33.5 million, 1993; $82.9 million, 1994, and $77.4 million, 1995.

Since the Energy Department projects that total national cleanup costs for all nuclear facilities may run nearly $20 billion, there appears to be some question whether the money will be appropriated by Congress within the period contemplated.

Some members of Congress think the department is understating the costs of solving the problem. This week, one of Nevada’s U.S. senators, Democrat Harry Reid, introduced legislation that would establish a $50-billion to $100-billion trust fund to clean up nuclear and other hazardous wastes at Energy Department facilities throughout the country over a 30-year-period. Much of the financing would come out of user fees, fines and interest on deposits.

The report on the situation at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site said that in addition to contamination at surface locations at Yucca Flats, Frenchman Flats, Pahute Mesa, Rainier Mesa and Shoshone Mountain, cleanup would also have to be undertaken for sumps and injection wells, inactive storage tanks, leach fields, muck piles and tunnel ponds.

“Another area of concern is the ability to characterize effectively subsurface conditions resulting from each underground test,” the report added. “There is a need to assess the potential for contaminating the ground water with radioactive materials, as well as toxic material released with each underground detonation.”

An Air Force bombing range and certain off-test site locations will also have to be cleaned up, the report said.