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20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face |
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City Weekly - July 26, 2007
Where There’s
Smoke
Are Utah fires spreading Cold War fallout all over again?
by Ted McDonough
As Utah’s largest ever wildfire scorched western Utah in July,
radiation monitors outside the town of Milford
began sounding alarms.
Set up during the Cold War to alert residents to radiation escaping from
bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site, the
monitors showed readings seven times higher than normal during the fire,
with some spikes of radioactivity higher
than the instruments could record—at 40 times normal background
radiation.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) says the readings
were nothing to worry about, probably
the result of monitors capturing naturally occurring radon escaping from
area soil. Skeptical nuclear watchdogs,
however, fear the fires now raging through Utah could be spreading
radioactivity leftover from Cold War bomb
tests.
NNSA’s explanation of the radiation readings is “an artful dodge,”
says Steve Erickson, director of the Utah
watchdog group Citizens Education Project. Erickson agrees the radiation
threat from the Milford fire was likely
minimal but says old fallout from the Nevada Test Site is a likely
cause, and the government should be looking
for it.
The idea that fires—all fires—are to some extent radioactive, is
nothing new, notes Dane Finerfrock, director of
the Utah Division of Radiation Control. For more than a decade, fire
watchers have noticed elevated radiation
readings, thought to be from natural radioactivity. The question is less
whether there is radioactivity in fires, but
whether it matters, says Kevin Rohrer, spokesman for the NNSA’s Nevada
Site Office. The radiation levels at
Milford, while elevated, were still well below readings that would cause
concern, even for firefighters closest by,
he says.
But nuclear watchdogs say radiation detection instruments used for the
Community Environmental Monitoring
Program (CEMP) don’t allow NNSA to make such blanket statements of
safety. Current monitors check in real
time for gamma radiation, but not two other potentially dangerous
radiation types. And the monitors can’t
immediately say what is causing elevated readings.
Downwinders Inc. and the Citizens Education Project are calling for a
review of the monitoring program and an
independent analysis of samples collected from Milford. The groups
complain that determining the source of
detected radiation takes too long to do any good in an emergency, since
radiation filters must be sent to a lab for
analysis. As City Weekly went to press, more than two weeks after the
Milford monitor first measured elevated
radiation, results of the Milford filter analysis had not been posted on
the CEMP Website cemp.dri.edu.
In fact, in the case of the Milford fire, the detection equipment in use
at the time will likely never determine the
radiation source.
“We may not be able to say what it was,” says David Shafer, who
oversees the CEMP monitoring program at the
Desert Research Institute (DRI) at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
“It’s a disappointment. It’s more likely we
can say what it wasn’t.”
If natural radon was the cause, as government scientists theorize, it
can’t be proven. The element doesn’t last
very long and any evidence of it would have disappeared by the time the
Milford filter reached the DRI lab.
So far, DRI’s scientists can say there was no evidence on the filter
of cesium-137, a manmade radioactive
isotope that is a telltale sign of Nevada Test Site fallout. DRI did
find potassium, uranium and several other
radioactive isotopes that are naturally occurring in the area.
Shafer says the institute is experimenting with advanced monitors he
hopes to put into the field, including
monitors that sniff for all radiation types and a monitor specifically
for radon. Additionally, the institute hopes to
perform controlled burn experiments to determine if radon is the cause
of increased radiation readings
associated with wildfire.
Radiation monitors, once spread throughout the country, were scaled back
after the United States stopped bomb
testing in the early-1990s. But DRI has added additional monitors to the
network in recent years in areas of
population growth in southern Utah and northern Arizona.
Downwinder activist Andrew Kishner thinks advanced monitors should be
arrayed throughout the West, given
emerging evidence that fires are spreading old nuclear fallout.
The idea that Cold War fallout can be suspended again in the air during
fires and travel far and wide isn’t just
speculation, he notes. Canadian researchers showed as much during
controlled burns last year. Looking for
evidence of secret modern-day nuclear testing, the Canadians instead
discovered radioactivity from old Cold War
fallout redistributed by forest fire.
The same thing was found during a large New Mexico wildfire in 2000.
Originally, scientists at New Mexico’s Environment Department thought
their radiation monitors during the Cerro
Grande fire were picking up leaks from modern-day tests at Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL). But
analysis of ash after the fire showed man-made radiation released by the
Nevada Test Site during open-air bomb
tests in the ’50s and ’60s. Plutonium, cesium, strontium and other
man-made nuclear products had been stored
in plants for decades, then left behind on the ground after the burn.
The levels found were high enough to trigger
health and cleanup warnings. It took from two to four years before
contaminated ash had fully washed off the
burnt landscape.
As in the Milford fire, the New Mexico monitors initially registered
only radiation from naturally occurring sources.
It took looking at the ash to determine the scarier aftermath. Follow-up
studies found smoke had carried old
fallout radiation as far as Idaho, where it was deposited on the ground
by rain.
“Immediately after the fire, most of the radiation was naturally
occurring,” says Dave Englert, environmental
surveillance manager at the department’s LANL oversight bureau. “That
diminished in 12 to 24 hours. What
remained were isotopes from the atmospheric (NTS bomb) testing.”
Englert says if New Mexico found Nevada Test Site material in ash, the
ash from July’s Utah fires, closer to the
test site, should be examined.
The Milford Flats fire has been brought under control, but as City
Weekly went to press, eight other large fires
raged in the state, including three on the Nevada border.
Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107
Idealist's public document archives: 1. 
2.
'The
greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that
the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.'
- Forgotten
Guinea Pigs Report, 1980
In 1986, the U.S. Dept. of Energy used the cover of the Chernobyl fallout cloud over the United States to release huge amounts of radiation into the air from a failed underground Nevada nuclear test. It was called Mighty Oak.
learn more on our global fallout page
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