Marketing a Nuclear Wasteland

This sun-scraped scab of desert has been pounded by the worst mankind could hurl at it: four decades of nuclear explosions.

Those trials are over now. But this echoing expanse remains the proving ground for audacious inventions. Only now it’s not the government experimenting, it’s private industry.

Need to blow up a building to test a new anti-terrorism design? Do it at the Nevada Test Site. Need to set a chemical fire to try out a new foam flame retardant? Feel free, at the Nevada Test Site.

Dump toxic substances on the ground to train emergency crews. Bury land mines to test detection technology. Send a brand new, one-of-a-kind reusable rocket hurtling into orbit.

Even the most violent and volatile of experiments can do little to land that has been assaulted by 928 nuclear explosions over the years.

That is why the U.S. Department of Energy is marketing the site--a wasteland bigger than Rhode Island--as the perfect place to conduct research that would not be welcome in the average American neighborhood. As the promotional brochure boasts: “No job too big.”

The push to woo private industry to the Nevada Test Site mirrors transitions underway at nuclear facilities across the country. With the Cold War over, the government has been trying to shrug off surplus weapons plants by cleaning them up and turning them over to communities for commercial development.

The test site, however, presents some unusual challenges:

It’s huge. It’s impossible to scrub clean. And it might one day be needed for more nuclear tests. Thus, unlike some other nuclear facilities, it can’t be transformed into, say, an industrial park. Instead, the Energy Department seeks to bring in private projects compatible with the site’s legacy.

“We’re selling the concept of a place where you can do things you can’t do anywhere else,” said Tim Carlson, who runs NTS Development Corp., a nonprofit group commissioned by the government to market the site.

Of course, not every company wants to be associated with a nuclear testing ground, even one that no longer sends mushroom clouds roaring through the dawn. Hundreds of craters from underground blasts still pock the earth like giant thumbprints in a just-baked pie. Yellow signs still warn of radiation here and there in the desert scruff.

“Gerber baby food will never move out here, because of the image,” NTS consultant Terry Vaeth acknowledged.

But plenty of other firms will. Exempt from many environmental restrictions, the site lets researchers step outside their labs and conduct real-life, full-scale tests too dangerous to undertake elsewhere.

Consider the Hazardous Materials Spill Center, a tangle of crisscrossing pipes and mock smokestacks gleaming in the dull brown emptiness. It’s centered on a giant wind tunnel built to spew toxic substances into the air--on purpose.

Companies and government agencies pay up to $1.2 million to dump dangerous brews by the tens of thousands of gallons through the wind tunnel or elsewhere at the facility. From a bank of nearby TV cameras, they can then monitor how the fumes spread in different weather conditions, or whether experimental cleanup methods work.

“It’s the only place we’ve found where we can spill this stuff,” said Mark Salzbrenner, a senior engineer at DuPont Chemical Co.

Every other year, DuPont holds two weeklong workshops for industrial customers who buy fuming sulfuric acid for products such as shampoo, laundry detergent and pharmaceuticals. Engineers spill the stuff into huge steel pans, then demonstrate how to battle the resulting blazes.

Each workshop costs DuPont $40,000, a fee Salzbrenner considers well worthwhile. After all, he says, “we’re not going to do this in the middle of Los Angeles.”

The spill center has been operating for more than a decade, but promoters are just starting to market it intensively to industry as part of the drive to commercialize the site. It’s a startling shift of focus for this lonely chunk of desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

For decades, the site was top secret, off limits, a proud if mysterious symbol of U.S. determination to preserve peace through overwhelming military strength.

Before the test site was established in 1951, the United States had exploded five nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. With tensions rising in Korea, President Harry Truman decided to shift the nuclear program to the mainland. Nevada, with its dry weather and low population, was selected.

The government conducted a handful of tests on peaceful uses for nuclear explosions in Alaska, Mississippi, New Mexico and Colorado, as well as 104 blasts on Pacific islands. But more than 90% of the nation’s nuclear tests took place at the Nevada site.

Then the Cold War crumbled.

In 1992, President George Bush declared a moratorium on nuclear testing that has held to this day. The Energy Department, which runs U.S. nuclear programs, responded with painful cutbacks at weapons assembly and testing facilities from Tennessee to New Mexico.

In the past six years, the agency has slashed its nuclear work force by a third. The Nevada site, suddenly stranded with no clear mission, fared even worse: Employment has collapsed from a Cold War peak of 11,000 jobs to fewer than 2,500.

Scientists lost their jobs, of course, but so did lab technicians and welders and mechanics. Half of the site’s 3,300 buildings, ranging from trailers to offices to elaborate labs, were vacated and declared surplus. “It created a kind of vacuum,” said Susan Haase, a vice president of NTS Development.

To cushion the blow, the Energy Department set aside more than $190 million over five years to help communities affected by the downsizing. Cities could use the grants to retrain laid-off workers, convert weapons plants to commercial use or put together incentive plans to lure new employers.

The Nevada Test Site received nearly $9 million of these funds, but with a caveat: Privatization would have to proceed with caution, because the government still has first dibs on the rugged, mountain-fringed site.

Though the U.S. has not set off a nuclear explosion in nearly six years, the Nevada site is still used for underground experiments designed to assess the stability of aging weapons.

Also, by law, the Energy Department must be prepared to resume full-scale tests within two years if the president ever gives the word. So the government could not simply hand the site to Las Vegas developers and let them have at it.

Clearly, a Ground Zero Casino was out. Instead, NTS Development has tried to market the site to industries that can take advantage of the equipment and brainpower assembled over the years to support nuclear tests.

“You’ve got a tremendous amount of energy . . . sitting there waiting to be of service again,” Carlson said.

Local leaders hope that wooing scientific projects to the site will diversify the state’s economy, which now leans on gambling and tourism for nearly half its revenue. At the same time, the government is eager to busy laid-off nuclear workers with peacetime challenges so they’ll keep their skills sharp in case testing ever resumes.

Whatever the motivation, electrical foreman Clifford Houpt is glad to see so much interest in revving up business for the repair shops and assembly facilities of Mercury, a town that serves as the test site’s faded barracks-style base camp. “We need all the work we can get out here,” he said.

Some of the projects drawn to the test site represent efforts to atone for the Cold War years of environmental destruction.

One firm plans to set up a shop to scrub clean the massive carbon filters that industrial plants now discard as hazardous waste. NRG Technologies of Reno will use the site to develop hydrogen-powered vehicles. “It’s a good place to test new fuels . . . that you don’t want to risk putting out on public roads,” said NRG President Kirk Collier.

The Corp. for Solar Technology and Renewable Resources, meanwhile, aims to build the world’s largest solar facility at the site, a plant that would supply power to 20,000 homes.

“We’re trying to refocus the emphasis . . . and design something environmentally friendly for a place that’s traditionally been weapons driven,” said Rose McKinney-James, the solar company’s president.

But the test site also attracts--and even welcomes--outcast industries. “We’re able to be the good guys for once,” said Tim Cooper, an Energy Department civil engineer. “We take these companies out of someone’s backyard and put them here.”

One such refugee from suburbia is Fluid Tech Inc., a small Las Vegas company that scrapes radioactive debris from machines contaminated by nuclear exposure.

Fluid Tech had planned to set up shop just outside the test site, near a school and senior citizens center in the town of Amargosa Valley. But the 1,500 residents would have none of it. They protested so loudly that Fluid Tech pulled out.

Now the firm plans to lease a test-site building once used to assemble nuclear rockets.

Fluid Tech President Dean Rowsell has his gripes about the test site: The rent is high, lease negotiations have been slow and he has to pay his employees extra to entice them to commute an hour each way. Still, it’s worth the inconvenience, he said, because “we don’t ever have to argue with the public” about the safety of the company’s operation.

“A lot of the public has the concept that radiation means danger,” he said. “It’s cheaper to pay the rent out there than it is to fight that attitude.”

Acknowledging that the test site already has been fairly well trashed, local environmental activists don’t express much concern about the projects there now.

“They’re never going to be able to reclaim it for 10,000 or 15,000 years,” said Randy Harnes of the Sierra Club’s Las Vegas chapter. “They might as well do [research] there.” With a wary chuckle, he added: “As long as they don’t do it while the wind is blowing this way.”

Just a few thousand people live within half an hour’s drive of the site. Though they monitor activities, local leaders have found nothing to complain about, said Amargosa Valley politician Pat Copeland.

Prospective tenants also express comfort with the test site, accepting government assurances that it’s safe to work there.

True, some wells have been tainted, and experts recommend drinking bottled water rather than taking a chance with the tap. But radiation released during atmospheric tests in the 1950s has long since drifted away. Less than 1% of the site’s soil is contaminated, the Energy Department says.

Tortoises, wild horses and rabbits roam the land with no apparent ill effects, and tourists are allowed to tromp around the edges of the saucer-shaped craters.

Given the constant monitoring, the site “is probably the safest place in the whole United States,” said George Mueller, chief executive officer of Kistler Aerospace, which is developing a reusable rocket to launch satellites there.

Most of the site’s new ventures so far have come from private, for-profit companies such as Kistler. Eventually, though, local leaders hope that the federal government will step in with its own projects.

The nonprofit Nevada Testing Institute is pressing Congress to fund a $1-million anti-terrorism center. Engineers could subject buildings to terrorist-style assaults to determine how best to safeguard lives and property, said institute President Pete Mote.

“They may say, ‘We need a 20,000-pound bomb, and we want to simulate a building in New York City that a Ryder truck can get within 20 feet of,’ ” he said. “We’ll say, ‘OK, we’re the place to do it.’ ”

The prospect of such projects cheers Nevada civic leaders who would love to see the site once again serve national security--without sending mushroom clouds billowing toward Las Vegas as the early atmospheric tests in the 1950s did.

“We want to take the technology and the personnel we had [for the nuclear industry] and apply it to new areas so we’re doing things for society instead of just blowing up bombs,” said Stephen Rice, associate provost of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Or, as NTS Development’s Haase put it: “Taxpayers paid for this place, after all. They should get some use out of it.”

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Nevada’s Nuclear Legacy

The United States conducted 928 nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992. Though most were conventional bombs, the government also tested a nuclear artillery shell, experimented with a nuclear-powered rocket and sought peaceful uses of atomic explosives for earth-moving projects.

Some facts about the test site:

* Las Vegas residents used to stand on their doorsteps to toast the passing mushroom clouds.

* In the early 1950s, troops from all four military services were deployed within a few thousand yards of atmospheric tests to train them in atomic combat.

* For a 1953 test dubbed “Doom Town,” scientists built a mock American community near ground zero, complete with cars, bunkers, and mannequin families. The explosion destroyed all but two houses.

* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for years managed a 36-acre farm on the site to test the effect of radiation on cattle, crops and wells.

* For a 1957 test, “Priscilla,” engineers built concrete domes, underground garages, bridges and other shelters near ground zero to see how they would fare in a blast. Most did poorly, although a bank vault survived intact.

* Scientists built a Japanese-style town and bombarded it with radiation in 1962 to determine whether houses shielded residents from exposure during the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

* Apollo 16 astronauts practiced driving their moon rover through test-site craters thrown up by nuclear explosions.

* The test site’s base camp, Mercury, includes dormitory housing for 1,200 as well as warehouses, laboratories, repair shops and a hospital. Recreation facilities include a bowling alley, movie theater, pool, track and cafeteria.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy