On November 13, 2009, Ralph Vartabedian, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about the poisoning of the aquifer below the test site.
“A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.
Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.
When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.
During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage.”
An article in Friday’s Section A about contaminated water at the Nevada Test Site said the federal drinking water standard for radiation is 20 picocuries per liter. There are three standards, depending on the type of radiation – for alpha particles, the standard is 15 picocuries per liter; for long-term radionuclides, it’s 50 picocuries per liter; and for short-lived tritium, it’s 20,000 picocuries per liter.
Representative Dina Titus wrote a book about nuclear bomb testing in Nevada called Bombs in the Backyard and it is available on Amazon.
Everyone can write to their representative asking for a current update on how nuclear radiation is impacting Nevada today. Radiation transcends political, radical, religious, or age boundaries.
https://www.aclunv.org/en/contact-your-elected-officials
To read Ralph Vartabedian’s entire 2009 article, click the link below.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-nov-13-na-radiation-nevada13-story.html
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