Study Says U.S. Rejected Safer Nuclear Test Site
By MATTHEW L. WALD,
Published: May 17, 1991
WASHINGTON, May 16— When the United States chose Nevada as the site for atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons four decades ago, Government officials knew the choice would mean that more people would be exposed to radiation than at an alternative site in North Carolina, a new study asserts.
But, the report made public today by a private anti-war group says, officials chose the Nevada site because it was already under Government control and could be used sooner and because it was closer to bomb production plants.
The United States abandoned atmospheric testing under the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1964. But the study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War says the underground tests have also created radiation that will eventually threaten human health.
The Energy Department, however, said today that underground testing was not a hazard to human health. Projected Cancer Deaths
The study by the physicians' group, "Radioactive Heaven and Earth," predicts that about 430,000 people will die of cancer because of exposure in this century to radioactive fallout, and millions more will die of exposure in the centuries to come.
The figure is based on United Nations estimates of the amount of radiation released from more than 500 atmospheric tests around the world and on a recent report by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences that sharply increased the estimate in the damage to human health caused by a given quantity of radiation.
The physicians' group, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, favors a moratorium on testing.
The study cites documents of the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor to the Department of Energy, from 1948 that it says show a preference for testing nuclear bombs on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where prevailing winds would carry the fallout over the ocean. But in the midst of the cold war, the Government believed it could begin tests more quickly in Nevada, because the site was already in military hands.
One document cited by the report, a 1948 memorandum prepared for the Army Chief of Staff, tells of a need for "re-education" of the public to accept testing "within a matter of 100 or so miles of their homes."
"There appears to be a need for adequate education of the people of our country concerning the radiological hazards resulting from atomic explosions," the memorandum said. "This should be realistic in nature, with the view to giving the public a correct understanding of this matter in order that the hysterical or alarmist complex now so prevalent may be corrected." The Government, the memo went on, should avoid pronouncements that create "an unhealthy, dangerous and unjustified fear of atomic detonations."
The documents also discuss the research possibilities offered by exposure of Pacific islanders to radiation. In the minutes of a January 1956 meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine, declassified in 1986 and cited in the report, one scientist says of residents of the Marshall Islands, "While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than the mice."
The scientist, Merril Eisenbud, retired several years ago as a professor of environmental medicine at New York University Medical Center. He did not respond to a message left on his answering machine this afternoon. Future Threat Is Seen
The last atmospheric tests were conducted in 1980 by France and China, but several countries still conduct underground tests. The United States is expected to conduct five this year. No recent American tests have allowed radiation to escape into the atmosphere, but Scott R. Saleska, an author of the report, said that moving the tests underground had not reduced the radiation produced by the explosions.
"The problems were only shifted out of sight, and the main risk transferred to future generations," he said. "The testing has created and is continuing to create unstudied, uncharacterized and unlicensed nuclear dumps for high-level radioactive wastes."
He noted that plutonium, a toxic substance that remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, has been cited as a major problem in the high-level nuclear waste tanks at the Government's bomb factory at Savannah River, S.C. But after more than 800 test explosions in Nevada, more than 700 of them underground, there is more than four times as much plutonium in the Nevada soil as in the Savannah River tanks.
Mr. Saleska is a staff scientist at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit private research group in Takoma Park, Md., which has previously called attention to safety problems in the storage of highly radioactive nuclear wastes left over from bomb production. The prime author of the reportwas Arjun Makhijani, the president of the institute. Plans for Waste Site
The report noted that the Nevada Test Site, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, borders Yucca Mountain. That site is currently the Energy Department's prime candidate as a repository for the disposal of civilian radioactive waste and nuclear waste from the manufacture of bombs. The Government plans to spend more than $1 billion to determine if Yucca Mountain is suitable as a long-term radioactive waste disposal site.
The volume of radioactive materials that would be stored at Yucca Mountain is about 60 times larger than the bomb waste, but the Yucca Mountain waste is supposed to be wrapped in packages that would isolate it for the first 300 to 1,000 years. In comparison, the report noted, "large quantities of radioactive wastes are being explosively injected into fractured underground cavities without serious concern about future containment of the long-lived radioactive materials." Some of these materials have already spread faster than expected, Government studies have found.
Map of Nevada highlighting nuclear test site