Tainted aquifers intensify Nev. water woes
Posted on November 16th, 2009
Greenwire: By the time the federal government ended nuclear testing at a remote desert site in southern Nevada, the arid state was left with 1.6 trillion gallons of radioactive water.
Over 41 years, almost 1,000 nuclear warheads were detonated underground at the Nevada Test Site, each blast sending loads of radioactivity into the ground, and sometimes directly into aquifers.
As the Cold War ensued, the state embraced its role almost as a patriotic duty. But that was before the state experienced a population boom that has stressed water budgets in residential areas like Las Vegas, just 75 miles southwest of the test site.
Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist, estimates that the radioactive contamination underground at the 1,375-square-mile site has spoiled as much water as it would take to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep — as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years.
“It is one of the largest resource losses in the country,” Buqo said. “Nobody thought to say, ‘You are destroying a natural resource.’”
The Energy Department has rejected calls to fund a cleanup of the site, and has instead focused its efforts on monitoring the movement of radioactivity, estimated to be about 3 inches to 18 feet a year. Federal officials say extracting the radioactive materials from the water would be prohibitively expensive, and they would still need a place to put it back into the ground.
But Nevada officials are not consoled. The state has pressured the agency to conduct a new environmental assessment of the site, the first step toward possible demands for monetary compensation or replacement of the lost water (Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 13).