Idealist - Nevada Test Site and environmental issues

The NTS is surrounded on three sides by over 4,000 acres of federally owned land comprising the Nellis Air Force Range and Tonopah Test Range. The expansive area, comprising both 'Yucca Flat' and 'Frenchman Flat' (formerly called the 'South Site'), was dubbed the 'Nevada Proving Ground' until 1955, when the moniker 'Nevada Test Site' was adopted.¹

Before the Nevada Test Site was put into use for atomic testing, the United States conducted its first nuclear weapons test in New Mexico (Trinity Test, 1945) followed by five tests in the Pacific (1946-1948).

The U.S. military initially chose to test in the Pacific to keep testing fallout away from populated areas but the logistics of conducting more frequent tests, combined with the costs of mid-ocean testing and security matters relating to the proximity of scientists and devices to foreign enemies, forced military planners to choose a continental 'proving ground.'

In late 1950, they chose the Nevada Test Site for its proximity to weapons development complexes in the Southwest and also on the belief that fallout would follow the prevailing winds over relatively unpopulated areas. The first nuclear test dubbed 'Able' was conducted there on January 27, 1951.²

From 1951 to 1958, known as the 'atmospheric testing era,' 119 nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site. 97 of those tests were conducted above-ground. (see the above Youtube video for more details on above-ground tests at NTS)

In October 1958, the U.S. entered into a voluntary test moratoria with the Soviet Union that lasted until 1961 when the latter broke the agreement by resuming atmospheric testing in September (1961) and the U.S. following suit later that month. During the test moratoria, the U.S. conducted several dozen secret hydronuclear tests (extremely low fission yield experiments) at the Nevada Test Site; previous hydronuclear tests were conducted from 1954 to 1956. There are currently still no environmental (surface radiological) impact data from these hydronuclear series.

This topic is largely a mystery. Why? Because the monitoring network in place in the 1950s to track the fallout in the U.S. and abroad was extremely sparse and poorly designed. That spotty data, unfortunately, has been the basis for nearly all the fallout maps seen printed in books, articles and in websites and also for dose estimates and projections of cancer rates that have steered judicial decisions, compensation legislation and 'common downwinder knowledge'.

Regrettably, for too long, politicians and scientists - and even downwinders - have failed to realize the worthless nature of the data. They relied heavily upon this data and, moreover, failed to endeavor to reconstruct the dose received by the American public through soil sampling.

More about the spotty monitoring network of the 1950s is chronicled on our gummed-film page.

What people didn't know about the fallout that landed from atmospheric testing

In the 1950s and 1960s, rarely was any American ever told the honest truth about NTS and global radioactive fallout - especially the impact on their food. Americans were literally overdosing on radiation by drinking (strontium-90 and iodine-131) radioactive milk over nearly two decades. The phrase 'Drink your milk' was actually the worst thing anyone could have said to another person in the 1950s and 1960s. The milk was poison. Americans were also consuming radioactive vegetable and meat products and they never knew they were poisoning their bodies and the bodies of their children. Most of our foods - and to a lesser extent, our water supplies - are still radioactive today, although at lower levels. That even includes 'organic' foods, and especially whole grain products and vegetables.

And what do U.S. government agencies do about it? They have - for 20 to 30 years - opted to not test most of our foods for radioactivity. We are blind to the poison we consume. Since many chemicals have a nasty way of staying in our bodies for a long time, every single one of us still has radio-chemicals in our bodies from Nevada Test Site fallout, as well as fallout from nuclear testing that occurred outside the Nevada Test Site. Newborns, children and teenagers get poisoned daily - even more than adults - from our food supply. Bizarrely, we all share this one thing in common - having radioactive fallout in our bodies from the NTS. Can you think of something else that we all have in common too? How about rising rates of leukemia, cancer and immune, heart, and neurological diseases in the U.S.? Idealist is not blaming all the incidences of disease and death on fallout from the NTS or the Pacific Proving Ground, but some of the blame should definitely go there. Read more. And some more blame to gaseous nuclear power emissions.

Residents closer to the NTS had to also suffer from the danger of inhalation of fallout and fallout landing on their bodies or clothes. Consider the AEC's 1955 brochure titled 'Atomic Test Effects in the Nevada Test Site Region' (pic) that was handed out to downwinders, who must have read the first sentence with much foreboding: 'You are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation's atomic test program.'

In 1980, a congressional subcommittee looked into the health effects of low-level radiation from NTS testing on sheep and humans, and came to the conclusion that 'the government’s program for monitoring the health effects of the tests was inadequate and, more disturbingly, all evidence suggesting that radiation was having harmful effects, be it on the sheep or the people, was not only disregarded but actually suppressed.'

The committee charged that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) - the agency responsible for the testing and that preceded the Department of Energy - was more concerned with nuclear testing 'than with its other mission of protecting the public from injury' and furthermore 'totally failed to provide adequate protection for the residents of the area.'

Although the committee's 1980 report and the early 1980s case - Irene Allen et. al. v. United States - helped raise awareness about fallout and downwinders, very little progress has since been made. U.S. governmental health agencies conducted studies into NTS testing fallout that were released in the late 1990s, but those studies focused on just Iodine-131 fallout and were based on nearly exclusively unusable gummed film data. The whole set of studies were a waste and since then no comprehensive governmental or robust, independent scientific study³ into Americans' exposure to fallout has been conducted.

The lack of fallout studies has drawn out the protracted struggle for compensation for downwinders nationwide- only a smattering of rural counties in the Southwest are covered by a one-time radiation exposure federal award program- for the simple reason that widespread ignorance and an 'information vacuum' about U.S. nuclear testing has been sustained (take our trivia quiz). Why? How? Well, it is a combination of cover-up and the truth is too much to bear for most people.

Around 200,000 persons, mostly U.S. military troops, participated in one or more of the nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s. Soldiers regularly were exposed to dangerous levels of immediate or lingering radiation and other atomic blast effects (flash blindness) in military drills. Those atomic veterans who later contracted radiation-linked diseases and illnesses have sought justice and compensation in a protracted fight that has oftentimes been made unbearable by the lack of forthcoming information by the DOE and DOD.

It turns out that American soldiers weren't the only 'guinea pigs' subjected to prompt-fallout conditions at the Nevada Test Site. The following dialogue took place during Dr. Helen Caldicott’s audio interview with Carole Gallagher, author of ‘American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War,' published by The MIT Press in 1993, for Dr. Caldicott's program ‘If You Love This Planet’ [Program #55 - 'Dr. Helen Caldicott with Carole Gallagher, Version 1; Date of broadcast: 2/27/2010; 00:40:52 – 00:42:23; http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/40214]

Gallagher: And what Robert Carter [atomic veteran] told me, and I had to get some corroboration from other soldiers, which I did, so, ‘cuz it sounded too crazy to me; he said he saw people near ground-zero in cages, like hurricane fence kind of enclosures, handcuffed to the fences with just what was left of their trousers on. So they were doing human experiments. And I started looking into that and it turns out I interviewed the man who lives in Albuquerque who was in charge of the airplane to bring these men from Panama in cages…

Gallagher: Exactly, I ran out of his house. I just didn’t want to hear anymore. He was in charge of that. He was also in some of the chemical weapons experiments and he just ripped open his shirt and showed me his chest, which was all scarred from chemical weapons tests in Maryland. So, I’ve seen it all, you know, I mean, in some ways. And the thing for a journalist is, you know, to verify. So, I had to verify Robert Carter and I got it verified not only by other soldiers who had been there but by the man who actually brought the people to be experimented upon.

Millions of more persons - civilians in downwind areas around the globe - were exposed to radioactive fallout measuring about 12 billion curies released from Nevada atmospheric tests: 150 million curies of it was Iodine-131 and about 140,000 curies was Strontium-90. The nearly 100 atmospheric nuclear tests at the NTS emitted into the atmosphere the same amount of radiation as at least 50 Chernobyls. Find more our 'Curies table' and our 'fallout maps' page. (Read more about the federal health studies into I-131 fallout exposure.)

(Read from a chapter (here) of Federal Court Judge Bruce Jenkins' 1984 legal decision - in one of the biggest downwinder lawsuits in U.S. history (Allen v. U.S.) - about the AEC's failure to give the public useful safety information and warnings about fallout. In the chapter - we provide it here online excerpted from his 489-page decision - Jenkins blasted the AEC for dishonest and misleading statements they made, especially in successive revisions of the pamphlet 'Atomic Test Effects,' and also their failures with regards to public health duties before, during and after the 'Dirty Harry' episode in St. George.)

Sometimes all we have to find out about the truth is from the victims themselves. Here are several multimedia resources:

* Award-winning audio-documentary titled "Dirty Harry - When the American Dream Became a Nightmare" (link to dedicated web page with short video intro) that covers the Nevada Test Site downwinders' experience from the 1950s through the 2000s. The documentary, released in 2006, is hosted by Jon Beaupre and was written and produced by Claes Andreasson. The audio is broken into three parts and can be accessed via the above link. Or, to save the files to listen to on-the-go, click the following file-links and download: One * Two * Three *

* 30-minute audio-documentary: The Dragon That Slew St. George (real audio stream) produced by Wayne Brittenden (about Dirty Harry epidsode)

* The 'Downwinder Diaries' (produced by Claus Andreasson) about fallout effects from the Nevada Test Site that begins in the audio documentary 'Mushroom Cloud' at the 22:00 mark (change the 'clip position' slider).

* Janet Gordon's account of the fallout impacts from Shot Harry. View an interview with her that was part of a documentary about stopping Divine Strake - watch here. Or just listen to the 4 minute 24 second audio-section from the 'Downwinder Diaries' - listen here

The four most common types of nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site were weapons effect, weapons related, safety experiment and Plowshare experiment.⁴ A few experiments in the 1960s - during the underground testing era - included surface, near surface, and catering tests; among them were nuclear rocket tests, more about them here.

The least known of these types probably are the 'safety experiments,' also referred to as 'safety tests' or 'plutonium dispersal experiments.'

Safety experiments were designed to determine how far plutonium would be scattered in accidents involving a nuclear bomb and involved the release of the pure form of plutonium 239 (Pu239), which is 1,000 times more potent than the dust- and debris-covered form that results from an atomic blast. Forty-two safety tests^4a occurred on the 'greater' Nevada Test Site: thirty-three (33) safety tests were conducted between 1955 and 1958, and five more between 1962 and 1963. On the adjacent Nellis Air Force Range, four (4) storage-transportation safety tests, comprising the Roller Coaster series, were conducted between 1962 and 1963. Only one safety test, 'Project 57' in Area 13, involved a real warhead, which was estimated to have released about 250 Curies of Pu239 - the amount a warhead associated with a 1.5 kiloton yield would contain. [One Curie of Pu239 is about 16 grams].

In 1979, an Atomic Energy Commission study indicated that plutonium-239 levels in soils in Utah were as much as 3.8 times higher than average concentrations elsewhere and was attributed to the handful of 'safety tests' conducted in 1957 and 1958. In 1997, a Nevada scientist found trace amounts of Plutonium-239 in the attics of homes in Las Vegas, St. George and other towns in Utah and Nevada which he believed was the second generation dust (resuspended via wind) from these plutonium dispersal experiments. There is reason to believe that detectable amounts of plutonium-239 in the top few centimeters of soils in the greater Southern Nevada region are disturbed regularly by construction activities, fires and wind erosion.

The last above-ground test in Nevada occurred in late 1962, and in 1963 the Soviet Union and the U.S. signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned atmospheric, underwater and outerspace testing. (Testing in the Pacific and other locations, including the South Atlantic, continued until 1962.)

From the early 1960s to 1992, during what is known as the 'underground testing era,' 809 nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site beneath the ground. 433 underground tests at the NTS leaked onto the surface and 100 of these were deliberate releases; the rest were unintentional.

Over 50 shots, including 'Baneberry,' according to official reports, spewed radiation beyond the test site boundaries. 'Baneberry' was detonated on December 18, 1970, at a depth of 900 ft. below-ground and blew through the surface of the Nevada Test Site. Over 6% of the test's total radioactive debris, entrained in a 7,000 foot high mushroom cloud, was spewed into the atmosphere, where it was picked up by the jet stream and rode the winds to the Northwest, Midwest, and New England, also crossing into Canada. Read: NUCLEAR WORKERS FLEE TESTING SITE (star news, dec. 19, 1970).

The real scoop is that virtually all of the 809 underground nuclear tests at the NTS leaked gaseous radioactivity offsite, both immediately and later on.

One of the worst such gaseous releases occurred sneakily during the aftermath of Chernobyl. On April 10, 1986, the underground nuclear test dubbed 'Mighty Oak' (click link to read our full analysis) got out of control. Test site officials, feeling the need to quickly clear out the tunnel cavity of dangerous gases but fearing the public would learn of the nuclear accident through higher off-site radiation readings, purposely vented in a big release weeks later during Chernobyl's 'fallout tour of the globe' so as to mislead the public.⁵ The public was not only misled - they were irradiated by both Chernobyl and the Nevada Test Site.

How is it that virtually all underground nuclear tests leak radioactive gases? A leak, or seep, can happen in the short-term or the long-term (long after an underground nuclear test took place). Seeps are small releases that occur in the days, weeks and years after a test, and happen as gases diffuse through porous spaces of the overlying rock and migrate to the surface; this happens sometimes with the 'help' of a low-pressure air front above the surface that 'sucks' up the gases from the rock. These types of seeps happen continuously at the Nevada Test Site. (Seeps also occur during 'drillback' operations, when test site workers sample blast cavities but gases inadvertently escape through the sample drill-hole).

In the immediate aftermath of a nuclear test, above- or under-ground, there is one gas that poses the greatest danger: Iodine-131. A notoriously heavy gas, Iodine-131 tends to fall-out in local areas near the emissions point (but can also travel considerable distances if injected into the jet stream) and is highly water soluble. It travels up the food chain - especially the grass-cow-milk-human chain - and eventually accumulates in the thyroid gland, where cancer can develop. Children are most vulnerable. (See our boxed feature on 'bioaccumulation' here). Iodine-131 has half-life of 8.02 days, so it falls into the category of a short-lived gas. Other short-lived gases, such as most radioxenon and radiokrypton gases, pose a danger to human health both because of their own radioactivity but also because of the radioactivity of the solid radioactive particles that they decay into!

It's a bizarre concept, but in the 'world of radiation' radioactive gases can, in minutes (or years), suddenly convert into a different element of a different form, solid or liquid! So, for example, if an underground nuclear test vents before many common radioxenon and radiokrypton gases fully decay - anywhere from a few minutes to three quarters of an hour after the blast - then these gaseous 'parents' give 'birth' (via decay) to radioactive solids. These solid-form carcinogenic organ-seekers include, among others, strontium-89 and -90, and Cesium-137.

This phenomenon - of strontium-90 and cesium-137 depositing in downwind areas of supposed well-contained underground nuclear blasts - is well-documented. For example, the ' LIRA' site in present-day Kazakhstan is where the former Soviet Union conducted six underground nuclear explosions in 1983 and 1984. According to an article published in the journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in 1992, an official government source described these tests as 'accident-free explosions' however worker testimonies indicate that gas releases occurred during at least one test. What the scientists found was that 'In comparison with background in the region the explosions caused a slight increase of the level of radionuclide contamination in the territory of the site. It was found that the release of 137Xe and 90Kr onto the surface is the main reason for formation of additional contamination with 137Cs and 90Sr.' So, the worker's whistle-blowing testimony was factual: an underground nuclear test leaked radioactive gases and the xenon 137, a gas that has a half-life of 3.9 minutes, decayed into Cesium-137; and the gas krypton 90, with a half-life of 33 seconds, decayed into strontium-90. The scientists concluded that 'The main mechanism of soil contamination of 137Cs and perhaps 90Sr (along with global deposition) at the LIRA sites is the after-explosion release of 137Xe and 90Kr that precedes the formation of these radionuclides.' ['Radionuclide contamination of the LIRA faciliticies [sic] territory,' Nuclear Instruments and Methods, 314 (3), pp. 541-43, 1992]

There is plenty of reason to believe that many of the underground nuclear tests at the NTS resulted in slight or great increases in surface contamination of cesium-137 and strontium-90 both onsite and off-site. Strontium-89/90 and cesium-137 are biological analogs for calcium and potassium, respectively, and Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 both have nearly 30 year half-lives. As biological analogs, they are mistaken for minerals, taken into the bone and muscle, and build up at dangerous concentrations.)

Interestingly, cesium 137 and strontium 90 tend to become distributed more widely than their fission byproduct peers - in a leak or vent - primarily because: a) their precursors gases are able to expand and rise rapidly while other nongaseous particles will have fallen to the ground and (b) these gases also escape the fate, of other fission byproducts, of (their or their decay products) being fused to surfaces or other particulates and thus gaining additional mass. So, we can assume that when the AEC/ERDA/DOE said that an underground test resulted in only on-site contamination, the reality was that radio-kryptons and radio-xenons - because of the these two factors - caused fallout of cesium 137 and strontium 90 in off-site areas. Consider that these are water-soluble radioactive isotopes that can rain or fall-out on land, crops, water supplies and people's houses, even after lingering as light metal dust-particles in the atmosphere for weeks or months and traveling appreciable distances on air currents.

Can these radio-kryptons and radio-xenons escape from underground test areas in sufficient quantities, before they decayed into solids, to reach winds high enough to take them hundreds of miles away? Well, a 1995 study published in the journal Applied Radiation and Isotopes noted that 'Calculations showed that it would take nearly 1 h [hour] to form the total cumulative yield for 137 Cs.'^5a Therefore, if xenon-137 gases immediately leak or seep from underground cavities, they have a 'travel time' of close to an hour before they fully 'precipitate' out into cesium-137. If an explosion's radioactive gases rise within that hour to considerable altitudes - where they can 'ride the winds' - the possibility exists for radioactive cesium to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers from the detonation's ground zero!^5b

What about long-lived radioactive gases? They can also and do seep from underground areas of the NTS, but over years and decades and even millennia. They include tritium gas (half-life: 12.26 yrs), which occurs naturally in our atmosphere in small quantities but is also created when the rock makeup of underground nuclear test areas is rich in lithium and boron. Tritium easily reacts with methane and water to form the tritiated forms of methane and water. In their gaseous forms, tritiated water vapor and methane vapor can leak through cracks and fissures and may condense in the atmosphere as precipitation. Carbon-14, also a non-noble radioactive gas that occurs naturally (it is created via the interaction of nitrogen-14 with cosmic ray neutrons), is produced in all nuclear explosions. Carbon-14 has the dishonorable distinction of inflicting the greatest long-term population dose of any of the gases produced by nuclear explosions because of its very long half-life of 5,730 years. It is present in our atmosphere in the form of ¹⁴CO₂, or radioactive carbon dioxide. 'Ordinary' carbon dioxide is technically Carbon-12 Dioxide, or ¹²CO₂. At his Nobel Prize lecture in 1963, Linus Pauling asserted that Carbon-14, which is created in large quantities - on the order of about 16 pounds per megaton - in nuclear blasts, poses a greater risk than all gaseous and non-gaseous fission (and fusion) products. He contended that in the long-term (over hundreds of generations), the carbon-14 pumped into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing (1951-1962) will be to blame for about 1.5 million gross birth defects and 15 million embryonic, neonatal, and childhood deaths. Those numbers, Pauling stated, won't include the minor genetic defects - passed from generation to generation - that may be 'responsible for more suffering in the aggregate than the major defects.'

Other long-lived gases that are continually seeping out into the air above the Nevada Test Site including krypton-85 (half-life of about 11 yrs) and argon-39 (half-life of 269 yrs).

What governments and news sources constantly fail to tell us about all of these radioactive noble gases, whether they originate at nuclear reactors or nuclear test sites, is that they are hazardous. Following North Korea's second underground nuclear test in 2009, on May 25, a CNN correspondent (Brian Todd, transcript 5/25/2009) said that 'this Xenon-133 is a very kind of low-grade gas...and it is not dangerous'. CNN is wrong. Dr. Helen Caldicott has noted that lacking any epidemiological studies (to substantiate or warrant CNN's claim) we must consider that xenon-133, which has a half-life of 5.25 days, perhaps even in minuscule amounts can cause harm. The same can be said for xenon-131, xenon-135, krypton-90, krypton-85, etc...

Here are some examples of the gaseous fission products spewed from nuclear reactors and leaked underground nuclear tests: Krypton-85 is beta and gamma emitter that hangs around for 10.7 years. Krypton-87, with a half-life of 1.27 hours, decays through both beta decay (a neutron splits itself apart) but also neutron decay (it spits out a neutron particle) on its journey to stable Kr-86. That neutron can turn anything, like cells in your body, into radioactive isotopes!. Since Krypton-87 has a half-life of 1.27 hours, for almost 24 hours it is floating around our communities, from reactor effluent, shooting neutrons into things converting them into radioactive versions. Krypton-88 is beta and gamma emitter with a 2.84 hour half-life, and decays into radioactive rubidium-88 (beta and gamma) and then stable strontium-88. Krypton 89, with a life-life of 3.15 minutes, is a beta emitter and decays into beta- and gamma-emitting rubidium-89 (half life of 15.2 minutes), a solid. Rubidium-89, after a few hours, converts fully into beta-emitting long-lived strontium-89. Strontium-89 is also a bone-seeker and will irradiate the bone marrow (and other parts of our body) similar to strontium-90!

There are many other lingering dangers at the NTS that are far from the thoughts and concerns of most Americans. Most people don't even know about these dangers. One of them is unexploded nuclear ordnance (bombs).

An anonymous letter sent allegedly by a group of DOE and EPA scientists to the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects in 1998 implied that one of the radiological 'situations' at the Nevada Test Site that a DOE-gutted environmental program would largely fail to 'mitigate' included nuclear "devices [that] have failed to detonate partially or completely." To date, the only NTS nuclear devices disclosed by the DOE to the public that fully failed to detonate were affiliated with the ‘Transom’ (May 10, 1978) and ‘Peninsula’ (October 23, 1975) underground nuclear tests. While Transom's device never detonated, the Peninsula test wasn't even conducted. The device fell 40 feet during emplacement and was damaged. Eleven test site workers were injured during the accident.

On September 6, 1979, the DOE carried out shot ‘Hearts,’ a 140-kiloton underground nuclear blast intended to create a shock environment to 'destroy' those two unexploded devices, both located in nearby underground test shafts. ‘Hearts’ was not intended to explode the devices but rather somehow render them safe, or safer. Hearts was 'successful' at destroying ‘Transom,’ but it took another nuclear blast dubbed ‘Azul’ on December 14, 1979 to 'destroy' the Peninsula device. (Azul’s yield was ‘less than 20 kt’.)

It is very difficult to believe that the DOE has 'closed the case' on these two unexploded nuclear bomb devices, or even other partially unexploded nuclear bombs underneath the Nevada floor. After the Transom device failed to produce any nuclear yield, the DOE announced to the Associated Press in 1978 that there was “no possibility of any additional explosion.” So, what was the reason for 'Hearts'? And how does the DOE definitively know that that the unexploded bombs were 'terminated'? Transom was estimated to produce a 20 to 150 kiloton yield and Peninsula would have produced a blast less than 20 kilotons.

Could these devices or other unexploded masses of atomic device material - sometimes called nuclear UXO, or unexploded ordnance - blow up beneath the Nevada desert? There is some debate regarding unexploded nuclear bombs - i.e., one off the coast of Georgia, another off the seabed near Thule, Greenland - over whether or not supercriticality, the condition that's ripe for a runaway, explosive chain reaction, could occur. Supercriticality is the mushroom-cloud, nuclear-explosive result of a runaway chain reaction of atomic disintegrations in a critical mass of fissionable material resulting from an extraordinarily rich environment of neutrons. Even if supercriticality isn't reached in a nuclear 'pile,' fission can occur at a slower rate (than a nuclear explosion) and produce quantities of radioactive byproducts of basically the same concentrations. So, at least it is possible that unexploded critical masses of nuclear bomb material located below the Earth's surface can emit radioactive gases that that could seep up to the ocean or ground surface and the resulting impacts on human health and our food chain from these gases could be mildly disastrous.

In both the above scenarios, the danger to the public would be found out too late. The DOE's network of tritium and beta monitoring stations arrayed throughout the Southwest were disabled at the end of the Cold War, so many radioactive gases - especially tritium - wouldn't be easily detected. Because of the second-rate and third-world quality of the U.S. radiation monitoring network (for the NTS and nationwide) the chances are poor that the DOE would know if radioactive gases were spewed across vast sections of the western United States.

In the U.S., our monitoring network has been one of the most embarrassing contradictions to technological and scientific progress. The EPA's Radnet, the Nevada Test Site's CEMP, and a slew of other regional monitoring networks are poorly equipped and run (in most cases) by inexperienced volunteers and contractors with conflicts of interests. They are poorly suited to radiological accidents, accidental releases and terrorist events.

EPA's RADNET (which before 2005 was called ERAMS) is the most comprehensive nationwide radiation monitoring network and is currently undergoing a vast so-called upgrade from 59 to 180 monitors over the 2006-2012 timeframe. Historically, the portion of the network that sampled radioactivity in air was basically a mail-order 'business.' (The number of stations in the 'air program' in ERAMS fluctuated from 67 in 1983 to 69 in 1988 to 52 in 2001 to 59 in 2005.) Volunteers would retrieve and replace air filters twice a week, and then using a G-M (Geiger) detector record beta levels about 5 hours after filter collection. (There are different GM detectors for each type of radiation: a Pancake G-M will detect alpha/beta/gamma, a thin-wall G-M will detect beta/gamma, and a G-M tube will only detect gamma.) The 'station operator' (volunteer) would then report the beta findings to EPA by phone (if bad) or mail (if not) and then pack and mail the filter to a EPA lab that would do more sensitive gross beta measurements on the air filters. If those levels met a certain 'trigger level' then gamma spectrometry analysis would then be completed. At some point, gamma spectrometry on-site capabilities were added, but the data was not streamed anywhere - it was static data.

The 'new' RADNET will do little better. It will provide a real-time on-site (on-station) gamma spectrometry that a far-away lab used to do on (the same) conditional basis- it will be 'triggered' (and then only 'real time') when a routine analysis of on-station gross beta counting (not beta spectrometry) of air filter registers a reading over 1 picoCurie per cubic meter of air. (Gamma spectrometry renders a confusing graph of gamma energy levels that can be used to pinpoint certain gamma-emitting radionuclides.) (The beta counter used by EPA is a 600 square millimeter Passivated Ion-implanted Planar Silicon detector.) The beta counting is done continuously by an on-site device that collects and measures beta levels of air particulates and streams (hourly, or more frequently) the data via satellite, land line, phone etc...The air filters are also sent twice weekly to an EPA lab for more sensitive analysis.

Add some 'telemetry' - meaning sending the data through satellite, cell phone or land lines - and you have a technologically advanced version of a still-poor monitoring network. Why? Well, none of the RADNET data is really real time or near real time: In the best case scenario in an emergency, EPA headquarters will learn about the entire radiation 'picture' 4-6 hours too late. Why? Well, although data from the beta counter and gamma spec are updated hourly, alpha counting can - at the present time - only be accomplished manually. According to the report 'Expansion and Upgrade of the RadNet Air Monitoring Network, Vol. 1,' the station operator removes and screens the filter after waiting 'at least five hours for radon progeny to decay;' then he/she will record gross alpha/beta and phone/mail in the results of the counts and also air volume data (what volunteer is going to to drive into a plume to do that??). It will take another 2 days or more for EPA's NAREL lab to get the filter by mail delivery and conduct more advanced radioanalyses on the filter. (In the 'old days' - before automated continuous beta detectors - station volunteers would take the filters and they wouldn't analyze them for beta until a 4-6 hour period had lapsed for the same reason: so as to 'permit decay of radon daughters that may be attached to collected particles.') Even if you think 4-6 hours is a good enough turnaround time to get the full picture of alpha/beta/gamma, consider that EPA will only know 'gross alpha/beta,' not what was causing the spiking, and they'll be in the dark certainly if the gamma spec doesn't show anything (that may be pure beta or pure alpha.) There is no instantaneous breakdown of beta or alpha. (That will take more than 48 hours.) EPA fully knows this: they state on p. 24 of the abovementioned report that 'gamma spectrometry can measure every available source of radioactive material ....except for the following sources: Pu-239, (and other transuranic alpha emitters) which is available in large quantities and emits only alpha radiation... [and] Sr-90, which emits only beta radiation, and is available in large quantities.' EPA's Radnet in a dirty bomb attack, thus, will be too little (in data) and too late (in response). Thus, Radnet in its present 'new' form is still highly vulnerable - and blind - to radiological events, especially those that consist of plumes of either pure alpha, or pure beta or pure gamma emitters. Why? Pure alphas or gammas won't trigger the gamma spec. And pure betas will trigger the gamma spec but the spec won't show anything! For no good reason, the EPA's fixed monitors have no real-time gamma exposure rate ability (only the deployables have them), so no one will know if cobalt-60 powder is flying around huge sections of the U.S. Why, why, why, when there are instrumentation for sale all over the world that can provide real-time, continuous alpha/beta counting AND spectrometry? (Also consider that in a 2007 Associated Press article titled 'US Short on Labs for Radiation Testing,' journalist Eileen Sullivan noted that owing to a shortage of labs nationwide that are certified to test body tissue, etc... for radioactive contamination in the event of a dirty bomb attack, "officials recently said the nation is ill-equipped to quickly track down the make and origin of nuclear materials.")

Then take the EPA's 'trigger level.' It is a bit too high: beta concentrations below 1 pCi/m3 in air in the United States regularly occurred during the 'off-seasons' of the worst stratospheric fallout episodes in the early to mid 1960s yet the Public Health Service still made distinctions in map isopleths of beta in air for as low as 0.5 pCi/m3 and ran gamma spectrometry on filters routinely regardless of 'low' readings. If the PHS thought a 0.5 level was good enough for the 1960s, then wouldn't you think it should be at least that level today?

Radnet also suffers from the same 'tiered approached to data review' that makes the public the last entity to see data. And what will they see? Data that is QCed and altered. The EPA notes in 'Expansion and Upgrade of the RadNet Air Monitoring Network, Vol. 1' that 'There are many circumstances in which we expect false anomalous readings from the real-time monitors. Data review will require several hours...it is anticipated that the data will be available to the public within 24 hours after it has completed the normal review process.' If you have reviewed our watchdogging of the CEMP tiered data approach, you will see for yourselves that 'data review' is a fancy word for erasing from public view data that the DOE or EPA doesn't want us to see, especially when it is a true anomalous reading that could cause panic and bad PR. Tiered data review is an invitation for censorship - plain and simple.

EPA apparently was going to install real-time alpha counting but experienced an engineering problem and gave up. They noted in a response to a science panel's findings and recommendations on its draft RADNET upgrade plan in 2007: 'Experience with the monitors subsequent to the review has shown that alpha measurement in near-real time is not feasible. An equipment malfunction on the detector (a "light leak") necessitated a solution (thicker window material) that eliminated alpha detection. Although re-engineering the detector in the middle of the implementation process is not feasible, EPA will evaluate alpha detection options after all monitors have been sited...The Final Plan will include a discussion of the lessons learned that supported the decision to not pursue further near-real time alpha measurement.' A EPA webpage, however, has stated for over 2 years now that real-time alpha counting will be added to the fixed station network: 'all new real-time sites will be equipped with an alpha/beta counting system, which improves upon the traditional beta only capability.' It is true or not? There are other questions - relating to calibration, QC, etc... - about the 'new' Radnet air monitoring network raised by the Radiation Advisory Committee’s (RAC) RadNet Review Panel of the Science Advisory Board - read a draft report of their 2006 concerns here.

Also, of the three events that inspired EPA to improve RADNET (all three events put it on emergency status), one was a suspected radiological gas release at a nuclear plant (Tokaimura) in Japan. That concern is not being addressed by the 'new' Radnet. Radnet (and CEMP) has no monitoring ability to detect radioactive noble gases that could be released in great quantities by nuclear reactor purges or accidents, or 'releases' of radioactive krypton or argon or tritium gases from the hundreds of underground test shafts at the NTS, or the two nuclear test shafts at Rio Blanco and Rulison, Colorado (both of which are endangered by gas drilling activities), or at other Plowshare test sites.

RADNET, however, only has and will only have two fixed stations in Nevada, one in Reno and one in Las Vegas, and one in Utah (near SLC). It doesn't seem that more stations will be added in NV and UT although Figs. 3.6.7 and 4.1 of 'Expansion and Upgrade of the RadNet Air Monitoring Network, Vol. 1' shows that southwest Utah will get a fixed station (click to p. 74). In an 'emergency' EPA *has the ability* to send its 40 or so deployable 'real time' monitors to rural Nevada and Utah but these mobile stations don't have any more capability than the CEMP! - they only provide gamma exposure rate (using GM detectors), not gamma spectrometry, so Utahns and Nevadans still - as always - won't have real-time ability to tell what is in their air. The 'deployables' have air filters, but those will take 2+ days to get analyzed!

By comparison, the DOE's CEMP network is the complete opposite of Radnet. It only provides real-time measurements of the gamma 'exposure rate' in air measured in Rems (roentgen equivalent in man) and doesn't provide any gamma (or other) spectrometry ability to pinpoint which radionuclide is causing gamma radiation spikes, nor automatic real time or manual on-site counting of beta radiation on collected filters. Filters in CEMP are collected twice monthly and sent to a lab.

NTS monitoring, in general, took a huge hit in 1998 when the DOE decided to gut its ability to monitor airborne plutonium - that may leave the test site via winds. Via a document titled 'Routine Radiological Environmental Monitoring Plan' (RREMP), the DOE argued against fully relying on a protocol called 'receptor monitoring' to estimate the dose to the public and instead argued to implement a half-and-half approach of using some monitors and some modeling. Had the DOE relied fully on the former approach, they would have had to install monitors capable - in order to be compliant with NESHAP - of detecting all radionuclides that 'may contribute up to 10 percent of dose.' This would include alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, etc... The EPA, however, argued in a 1998 letter to the DOE that the DOE's argument 'obscures the basic issue of uncertainty in resuspension of plutonium for air transport to the offsite.' The EPA argued that since the DOE hasn't mapped out the plutonium sources at the NTS and thus they don't know where the plutonium is, then 'receptor monitoring' would be 'the only way to assure that the offsite public is not being unduly exposed.' The EPA noted that using models and monitors to predict movements of tritium and other radionuclides might be feasible, but 'it is plutonium which is problematic.' They argued that the DOE's reduction to 6 offsite high volume air particulate samplers- these are run continuously for a timespan of one month and best suited to measure radionuclides like plutonium that are hard to detect but have a low action level - was unacceptable: 'Reducing this number to 5-6 is not substantiated, since it is clearly an important measurement. EPA stands by our original proposal for a network of 12 high volume air samplers...for the very reason which has been cited as a shortcoming of receptor monitoring - that the location of the Maximally Exposed Individual might vary from year to year.' The 6 high volume samplers, which are unaffiliated with CEMP, are nowhere near Las Vegas; they are only near the NTS perimeter (Alamo, Beatty, Rachel, Amargosa Valley, Indian Springs, and Goldfield) and there's a gap to the east of the NTS between Alamo and Indian Springs that is more than 60 miles wide that a plume of plutonium can very easily slip through. Note that each fixed air monitor station in EPA's 'new' Radnet network will have a high-volume air sampler, however, historically, ash plutonium and uranium isotope analysis on air filters have been completed in RADNET once a year.

Other than Radnet, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Environmental Measurements Laboratory (EML), which operates the Surface Air Sampling Program (SASP), has 41 active sampling stations worldwide that count humanmade and naturally occurring isotopes in weekly air filter analyses.

(The anonymous group of scientists blasted the DOE in their 1998 letter for pulling the plug on this and other routine radiological monitoring programs around the test site.)

Read our letter calling for improvements to radiation monitoring around the Nevada Test Site and about our continuing efforts to watchdog this problem on our Milford page. Visit our Gamma Hall of Fame page page and view real-time charting of radiation in the southwest (around the Nevada Test Site) from CEMP stations.

Read EPA's 2005 report "Expansion and Upgrade of the RadNet Air Monitoring Network", Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (that are no longer available at the EPA URLs - or anywhere online except at scribd.com or archive.org (2006-2008)- of http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/er/draft_radnet_plan-vol1.pdf or http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/er/draft_radnet_plan-vol2.pdf)

Although Yucca is dead, nuclear waste storage in shallow and also (mostly) unlined trenches is a mainstay of the 'NTS economy'. Trucks hauling nuclear waste from other government operations across the U.S. converge at the NTS almost daily. These trucks are constantly emitting gamma radiation into the environment on our roads and rest stops. Read more on our NTS waste and storage page.

In October 1992, the U.S. entered into an unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing and the last nuclear test was carried out at the NTS on September 23, 1992. Since 1997, the NTS has been host to subcritical (underground 'almost'-nuclear tests) experiments, and also dynamic tests, which are basically nuclear material (plutonium) experiments - these tests subject plutonium to extreme temperatures and high pressure shock waves. At the U1a facility, NTS personnel conduct Large Bore Powder Gun experiments and imaging (CYGNUS radiography) experiments, both involving plutonium or other nuclear materials. The large-bore powder guns would be used to fire large projectiles into 'fixed special nuclear material targets.' The NNSA has not specified the number of these type of subcritical experiments that will be conducted annually. Shock physics experiments on plutonium also occur at the Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research Facility.⁶

Hydrodynamic (back-door) subcritical experiments take place also at Las Alamos National Lab. More on our subcritical page.

In early June 2006, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) had planned - but was thwarted in its attempts by citizen protests and a lawsuit - to conduct Divine Strake, a conventional explosives test designed to assess the bunker-busting ability of a low-yield nuclear weapon. Divine Strake, which was planned for an area of the Nevada Test Site that is contaminated with radioactive particles deposited from several 1950s above-ground nuclear tests, was twice postponed, then cancelled in February 2007. In the DTRA's press statement announcing the test's cancellation, the DTRA expressed its intent to conduct smaller 'confirmatory experiments' - believed to be small-scale surface explosions at the same or adjacent location - instead of Divine Strake. The DTRA has not mentioned that they would complete environmental studies to ensure that its tests pose no risk to those downwind or give prior notification. Moreover, the language in the DTRA's February press release does not specify what they mean by experiments that are 'smaller' than Divine Strake, which entailed 700-tons of conventional explosives. Is the DTRA planning several 3-ton tests, or 30-ton tests, or perhaps a single 600-ton test at the Nevada Test Site for 2008? All three scenarios are not out of the realm of possibility since they all would technically be 'smaller' than the 700-ton Divine Strake test. According to the NTS Ten Year Site Plan, DTRA uses many miles of tunnels at the NTS 'to conduct experiments and training in support of hard/deeply buried target location and defeat, conventional munitions demilitarization, and other experiments and testing.'

When New York State got nuked by Simon

On April 25, 1953, at 4:30 am Pacific Standard Time, 'Simon,' a 43-kiloton atomic device at the Nevada Test Site, was detonated 300 feet above-ground. The top part of Simon's mushroom cloud rose to over 40,000 feet and rode the jet stream at first slowly (around 50 mph) through the south-central part of the U.S. and then sped up to about 100 knots (115 miles per hour) as it steamed towards New England. (In Nevada, the fallout actually forced the AEC to set up roadblocks and decontaminate vehicles). Around midnight that same day it intersected with an impressive cluster of thunderstorms in the Northeast near the Albany-Troy area of New York State. In this upstate region of New York, a 'rain out' of an incredible amount of radioactive fallout from Simon occurred on April 26.

The best data available came from a gummed-film monitoring station at Albany Airport that recorded 16 million disintegrations/minute/square foot/day between late on April 25 to the afternoon of April 26. What is this number? It is the number of times per minute that a radioactive decay occurs; the decay could be the emission of a gamma ray, an alpha particle, or a beta. The fact is no one can tell with this figure what was the true nature of the radioactivity and the strength that fell at the Albany airport. But it does tell how many atoms are 'popping' from one state to another via radioactive decay, and this was the highest number ever recorded in the gummed film monitoring network up to that time.³

Although gummed film was notoriously inefficient at determining fallout - especially in rainy conditions - this is the best data there is. And this value is about 800 times the radioactivity¹ of the strontium-90 that cumulatively coated the United States during the entire 1950s and 1960s. Albany's fallout, however, all came down in one day! The on-ground levels of radiation were believed to be 1,000 times normal background levels at the time the fallout came down with the rain² which was slightly higher than the readings taken outside of the Three Mile Island reactor after its partial meltdown in 1979.

In the 1954 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission paper titled The transport of atomic debris from Operation Upshot-Knothole by government meteorologist Robert J. List, List notes that "it is certainly probable that other areas, not surveyed by air and not containing ground monitoring stations, would have had even higher readings. For example, a very heavy shower occurred in eastern Pennsylvania between 2200 and 2300 G.C.T. Southern Vermont and western Massachusetts had heavy showers from 0200 to 0300 G.C.T. These may well have scavenged more debris than was found near Albany."

List also mentioned that other parts of the country probably were slammed by similar severe 'rain-out' events: "It is also of interest to examine the trajectories and precipitation patterns accompanying bursts of this and previous Nevada tests series to see if other potentially serious cases of intense localized fallout could have occurred which were undetected by the monitoring network. Several such situations were found. They are: New York and New England on November 1, 1951, November 3, 1951, and April 7, 1953; Nebraska on May 26, 1952; and Wyoming on May 8, 1952. The latter case appears to be the one most likely to have produced intense local fallout."

Nevada above-ground testing continued through 1962 and List's report only chronicled fallout through mid-1954.

¹ Converting the 16 million d/m/ft2 reading to Curies, we have (0.0072072 milliCuries/square foot/day x 27,878,399 sq. ft/sq. mi) 200,925 mCi/sq. mi/day.

The cumulative deposition density in the continental U.S. of Sr90 in the late 1960s was between 200 and 250 pCi/mi2 (UNSCEAR 2000 Annex C.)

Using the higher (250)number, the difference between the two figures is 800 fold.

In the 1954 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission paper titled "The transport of atomic debris from Operation Upshot-Knothole" by government meteorologist Robert J. List, List notes that "since the debris was 36 hours old," then 10 to the power of 7, or 10 million disintegrations/minute/square foot/day, "is more nearly the activity at the actual time of fallout."

In Roswell, New Mexico, on April 25, the readings from dry fallout from a lower level cloud from Simon measured 13 million disintegrations/minute/square foot/day.

² Value of 30,000 microRem (30 milliRem) per hour; A Good Day Has No Rain (2003; Whitston Publishing Co.) by Bill Heller: "Clark also extrapolated that the rate at the time of deposition of the fallout was 30 millirads per hour." p.46

³ In his book 'Under the Cloud,' Richard Miller sets out a formula to convert disintegrations per unit of time to Roentgens (dose to human). For his formula, Miller states that 'a good approximation of the exposure rate' (from gamma) can be determined by calculating the energies received at waist height (3.28 ft) from a circular parcel of gamma-irradiating land with a 10 meter (30.48 ft) radius. Miller calculates - using some calculus - that the exposure from 0.3 MeV gamma rays at 1 meter above ground from a 10 meter radius circle around the human with a radioactivity of 1,000,000 disintegrations/minute/sq. ft is 12 microRem/hr.

An easier method is to simply figure out the dose from a 20 meter square parcel and multiply by 0.765 to figure out the area of the circle that would fit inside (10 meter radius). The figure 1,000,000 disintegrations/minute/ft² is the same as 10,763,910 disintegrations/minute/meter², or 4.8 x 10^-6 Curie/meter². Since we want 20 square meters, we multiply this by 20 to get 9.6 x 10^-5. Using Miller's formula E=6Ce/distance², we multiply 6 x 9.6 x 10^-5 x 0.3/(3.28 feet)²= 1.6 x 10^-5 Rems/hr. We multiply this by 0.765 to get the area of the circle within to get 1.2 x 10^-5 Rem/hr. This is also written as 1.2 x 10^-2 milliRem or 0.012 millirem, or 12 microRem/hr, which agrees with Miller's tabulation.

So, as a shortcut to find out the gamma dose from disintegrations per unit of time, convert area cited in the disintegration number to square meters, then convert disintegration number to Curies per square meter, and then multiply by 20 x 6 X .3 x 0.765 divided by 10.75. Even easier, multiply the disintegration number in curies per square meter by 2.56 to get the dose in Rem, or 2,560,000 in microRem. Disclaimer: Don't take this to the bank, we have no idea if this is correct!

So, in the case of the Simon reading of 16,000,000 disintegrations/minute/square foot/day, we multiply this figure by 10.76 to get it in square meters and multiply by 4.5 x 10^-13to get Curies, then multiply it by 2,560,000, and we get 205 microRem/hr from gamma rays.

Certainly, one has no idea what kind of energy is giving off the disintegrations; due to fragmentation of the radioisotopes in a fallout cloud, it could be a whole bunch of gamma particles that would elevate the exposure into millrems or rems.

Other surface blasting occurs at the NTS's Big Explosives Experimental Facility, or BEEF, located in Area 4. BEEF hosts small explosives - up to about 3.5 tons - tests in both open-air and enclosed large bunkers called 'containment vessels.' The BEEF, which also hosts experiments on depleted uranium, is located just a short distance, about one kilometer, from Area T-4, the site of four atmospheric nuclear bomb tests and significant subsurface contamination. Shockingly, BEEF testing may be shaking the ground at area T-4, which is not cleaned up, and may resuspend the radioactive matter to be carried off-site by winds. (In 2009 the DOE Environmental Management agreed with the State of Nevada to close, instead of fully remediate, the T-4 area.)⁷

The Nevada Test Site , a DOE facility, is overseen by NSTec, short for National Security Technologies, LLC, a consortium of companies, managed by Northrop Grumman and includes AECOM Technology Corp. of Los Angeles, CH2M Hill Companies Ltd. of Englewood, Colo., and Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. of Erwin, Tenn.

In early 2006, NSTec was awarded a $2.5 billion, 5-year (taxpayer-funded) contract (that can be extended for another five years depending on performance) to oversee and manage the Nevada Test Site. In December 2008, NSTec was awarded a one-year extension, thereby extending the contract through 2012. In December 2009 (totally unexpected!!) another one-year extension was granted thereby extending the contract through 2013.

NSTec’s main administrative office is located at 2621 Losee Road, Las Vegas, adjacent to the Nevada Site Office for the NNSA. NSTec has four divisions: Experimentation and Stockpile Stewardship (monitoring and maintaining nuclear weapons), Environmental Management (nuclear material handling and storage), Homeland Security & Defense Applications (national defense matters and security and threat prevention), and Operations and Infrastructure.

60 years after the fallout descended on our homes, our food supplies and our water supplies and our air is still contaminated from long-lived radioactive fallout from Nevada.

To this day, radiation continually escapes from the NTS during wind storms, wildfires, and construction activities. That is why we must close the Nevada Test Site.

Nevada nuclear testing trajectory maps: Fallout trajectory maps only illustrate the approximate altitude and path (and in some cases speed) of a radioactive cloud; they are drawn based on data recorded by radiological technicians aboard aircraft, or from other types of data. What these maps don't show is the decaying radioactive composition of the cloud; for example, a cloud may be 50% less radioactive in Minnesota than when it was formed in Nevada...trajectory maps don't show that.

In mid-November 2009, the NNSA/NSO began domain forwarding from www.ntscab.com to a subdomain on the NV/DOE website. Prior, www.ntscab.com hosted information on NTS Citizen Advisory Board traffic and visitors' traffic wasn't - to our knowledge - monitored by DOE. Concurrent with the hosting change, all visitors have their every click and every download recorded by the DOE for ' interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of authorized site or Department of Energy personnel.'

³ An exception is the independent St. Louis Baby Teeth Follow-Up Study, a long-term attempt to remedy the fact that there has been 'virtually no long-term health effects studies of low-level radiation exposure.' The Radiation and Public Health Project, which inherited the study, demonstrated - in its 2009 status update - a slight indication that high Strontium-90 levels in teeth may be correlated with cancerous death, but the sample size in the study was tiny.

⁴ Read about Project Rulison, a Plowshare nuclear test in Colorado that contaminated over 400 million cubic feet of natural gas that later was flared off into the atmosphere despite the objections and a lawsuit filed by activists in the late 1960s. Nowadays, the DOE is letting test drillers play 'radioactive chicken' as they drill closer and closer to contaminated underground areas and putting residents in danger.

^{Plutonium dispersal experiments at NTS or NAFR
from 1955 to 1963}

Series	Shot name	Y	M	D
Project 56	Project 56 No. 1	1955	NOV	1
Project 56	Project 56 No. 2	1955	NOV	3
Project 56	Project 56 No. 3	1955	NOV	5
Project 56	Project 56 No. 4	1956	JAN	18
Project 57	Project 57 No. 1	1957	APR	24
Plumbbob	Coulomb-A	1957	JUL	1
Plumbbob	Pascal-A	1957	JUL	26
Plumbbob	Saturn	1957	AUG	10
Plumbbob	Pascal-B	1957	AUG	27
Plumbbob	Coulomb-B	1957	SEP	6
Project 58	Pascal-C	1957	DEC	6
Project 58	Coulomb-C	1957	DEC	9
Project 58A	Venus	1958	FEB	22
Project 58A	Uranus	1958	MAR	14
Hardtack I	Scaevola	1958	JUL	14
Hardtack II	Otero	1958	SEP	12
Hardtack II	Bernalillo	1958	SEP	17
Hardtack II	Luna	1958	SEP	21
Hardtack II	Mercury	1958	SEP	23
Hardtack II	Valencia	1958	SEP	26
Hardtack II	Mars	1958	SEP	28
Hardtack II	Hidalgo	1958	OCT	5
Hardtack II	Colfax	1958	OCT	5
Hardtack II	Neptune	1958	OCT	14
Hardtack II	Vesta	1958	OCT	17
Hardtack II	San Juan	1958	OCT	20
Hardtack II	Oberon	1958	OCT	22
Hardtack II	Catron	1958	OCT	24
Hardtack II	Juno	1958	OCT	24
Hardtack II	Ceres	1958	OCT	26
Hardtack II	Chavez	1958	OCT	27
Hardtack II	Ganymede	1958	OCT	30
Hardtack II	Titania	1958	OCT	30
Nougat	Ermine	1962	MAR	6
Storax	Chipmunk	1963	FEB	15
Storax	Coypu	1963	APR	10
Storax	Tejon	1963	MAY	17
Niblick	Mullet	1963	OCT	17
Roller Coaster	Double Tracks	1963	MAY	15
Roller Coaster	Clean Slate I	1963	MAY	25
Roller Coaster	Clean Slate II	1963	MAY	31
Roller Coaster	Clean Slate III	1963	JUN	9

^5aThe total yield of 137Cs would be the result of the full decay of its radioactive precursors, 137Te, 137I and 137Xe, which have a combined half-life of 261 seconds, or 4 minutes 21 seconds. If we consider that near full decay occurs at 10 half-lives, then the full cumulative yield (or quantity) of Cesium-137 occurs at about 43 minutes (however, after 10 half-lives, small fractions of un-decayed products remain).

Quote from 'Plutonium Mass Balance Released from the Nagasaki A-bomb and the Applicability for Future Environmental Researchm' Applied Radiation and Isotopes, 1995, Vol 46, No. 11, pp. 1089-1098))

^5bConsider that the radioactivity of all the radioactive gases in a 5-kiloton (kt) blast will decline from about 2,500 million Curies at 1 hour (post-explosion), to about 500 million Curies after 4 hours, and about 500,000 Curies after 60 days. If we narrow the scope to just Xenon and Krypton gases, then the radioactive will decline from 200 million Curies at 1 hour, to 50 million Curies at 4 hours, 2.5 million Curies at 2 days, and 150,000 Curies at 20 days. In one hour, the amount of radioactive gases (not including Iodine) from a 5-kiloton blast in one hour would be 4-15 times* higher than the emissions from the Three Mile Island accident. (*Dr. Karl Morgan gave a high estimate of 45 million Curies in leaked gases for Three Mile Island.)

If all of these radioactive gases quickly leaked, then we know that these radioactive gases will deposit about 90% of the contribution of the total Cesium 137 (137Cs) and Strontium 90 (90Sr) produced by the fission reaction. Why? Because these two solid radioisotopes are predominantly formed by precursor gaseous isotopes formed in a nuclear explosion. (This is a fact that nuclear plant operators vigorously hope you won't realize whenever they report annual radioactive gas emissions of xenon and krypton while simultaneously claiming these gases are relatively harmless. First, these gases aren't safe to breathe in. Second, as soon as they leave the power plants 'stacks,' the 'mass 90' and 'mass 137' nuclides (any gaseous isotope ending in the number 90 and 137) will precipitate in and around communities neighboring the nuclear power plant in the form of Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 respectively. For instance, in 1975, the EPA reported that Millstone Unit 1 nuclear plant in CT released 2.97 million Curies of radioactive gases, which was an extraordinarily large release for one year. However, part of this gaseous release consisted of 90Sr and 137Cs precursors. Ernest Sternglass found in 1977 that children living near two of Connecticut's nuclear power plants were ingesting - in their milk consumption - Strontium 90 at levels up to 241% (in 1976) of natural background radiation. The nuclear power industry and nuclear nations (aspiring to resume underground testing one day, and also trying to keep their downwinder populations in the dark so as to avoid compensating them for disease-related injuries and deaths ) don't want you to 'get smart' about the dangers of these gases.)

Our calculations indicate that a 5 kiloton underground nuclear blast - if all Krypton and Xenon gases quickly leaked - will produce, and introduce into the environment, about 1,500 Curies of radioactive Cesium and Strontium. In his book 'No More War,' Linus Pauling stated that one teaspoon (about 4.2 grams) of Strontium 90 if distributed evenly amongst all people in the world would kill all of the people in the world in a few years. As it turns out, the full yield from a leaked 5-kiloton underground test of Strontium 90 is about 5 grams and if distributed evenly would kill the world's population of 1950 or about one-third of today's world population.

⁶Details about what will go on at NTS in the future are outlined in the Ten Year (FY2009-2018) Site Plan for the Nevada Test Site (DOE/NV--1271) here. And in the DOE's Complex Transformation plan. According to that plan the NTS would be the new host to the High Explosives Facility, where large-scale (15 kilograms or more) open-air explosives testing will occur. Under Complex Transformation, BEEF activities would be expanded to include open-air hydrodynamic testing of nuclear surrogate materials and about five 'full function experiments' will be conducted yearly. Under Complex Transformation, BEEF nuclear materials testing would be done underground in an enclosed bunker or at the U1a facility.

⁸In late June 2009, the NNSA closed Area T-4, which is located in Area 4 of the NTS on Yucca Flat and was host to 4 atmospheric nuclear tests. The T-4 area closure was hailed for its impact on saving taxpayers millions of dollars but the soils are not and will be not cleaned up. Area T-4 was part of 16 'tests locations' closed in the summer of 2009. (According to the September 11, 2009 issue of EM Update, the DOE Environmental Management department's newsletter, 'During the summer of 2009...the State of Nevada approved the closure of 16 former atmospheric nuclear weapons test locations.') As long as these areas aren't cleaned up, future impacts on these still-contaminated areas from high-winds, wildfires and human-made activities can 'stir up' the soils and endanger off-site residents.

Our view: There is something amiss when the NNSA administratively (and physically) closes radioactive areas of the NTS for taxpayer consideration but then goes ahead and helps the Department of Defense blow up radioactive soils and shares in the pot of money spent. The NNSA dipped into the cookie jar (up to $23 million) of the Divine Strake experiment, which would have blown up radioactive dirt from nearby Area 16. The NNSA didn't refuse to help (and get paid by) the DoD on grounds that the money would have been better spent on cleaning up 'closed' areas. Taxpayers should inform the DOE and NNSA that their priorities need 'corrective' action.

The DOE's NNSA adheres to a federal-state agreement with the State of Nevada called the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO) to identify parts of the Nevada Test Site with potential contamination and 'implement corrective actions based on public health and environmental considerations.' The agreement, among other things, outlines a process that allows the DOE, under the oversight of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, to close certain areas of the test site even without remediaton (full clean up) of the soils.

Idealist's public document archives: 1. 2.

U.S. NUCLEAR tests: 128 A + 899 U in NV,
1 A in NM, 10 U (in NM, CO, AK, MS, central NV),
100+ A, U in Pacific, 3 A in S. Atlantic
(A=aboveground; U=Underground)

'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.

Did global fallout cause massive mutations that may explain disorders like autism?

learn more on our global fallout page

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20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face
1. Nuclear reactors crashing on Earth from space and fallout from: 2. Pacific nuclear testing 3. the Nevada Test Site 4. High-altitude nuclear tests 5. Project Rulison 6. Mighty Oak nuclear test 7. North Korea's nuclear tests 8. Global nuclear testing 9. 'Project 57' (Area 13) 10. Trinity, WSMR & Steel	11. Hanford & INL & LANL 12. Nuclear Power 13. DTRA's Divine Strake's babies 14. Fallout resuspension: Milford Flat Fire 15. Australia's fallout and duststorms 16. Hiroshima & Nagasaki -and- 17. Low-level radiation impacted viruses 18. Radioactivity in drywall (dust) 19. Nuclear waste transport 20. Greenham Common