- For about two years now, I've been regularly re-reading
an article saved on my desktop that is titled 'Atomic "Safety Tests"
in 1950s Showered Utah With Plutonium.' It was published by the Washington
Post in 1979.
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- What has bothered me about this article for a long time
is that no one ever seems to reference it and, also, that I simply have
not been able to understand how it could be true. Most scientists and
amateurs, such as myself, know that the fallout from past atomic blasts
contained little plutonium since that fission 'trigger' material is usually
consumed by the nuclear blast. I also knew about the so-called safety
tests of 1957-1958 when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) conducted plutonium
dispersal experiments in and around the Nevada Test Site.
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- I never believed that when the AEC started blowing up
mock or real warheads that the plutonium dust would travel 'that' far into
Utah and create 'that' much contamination.
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- The 1979 Washington Post article states that plutonium
was spread across the most densely populated part of Utah - meaning in
and around Salt Lake City - in the late 1950s that produced levels of plutonium
as much as 3.8 times higher than concentrations elsewhere. What was surprising
to those scientists is that the plutonium - the most radiotoxic of all
materials - was found in such large quantities. The scientists in Utah
attributed it to those safety tests. The same happened with a Nevada graduate
student who in the 1990s found plutonium dust in the attics of homes in
Las Vegas and other towns in Nevada and Utah that he attributed to the
safety tests.
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- The worst of all the safety tests was 'Project 57,' which
contaminated Nevada Test Site's Area 13 with four times more Curies of
radioactivity than average at nine other safety test sites. The estimated
contamination at Area 13 is 46 Curies - hundreds of acres of soils are
contaminated at levels that would provide a fatal dose to humans.
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- The plume cloud from Project 57 apparently went north-northeast
and deposited just over 200 Curies of plutonium over a large area extending
towards Ely, Nevada, and into Utah, and possibly Salt Lake City. Since
plutonium concentrations greater than 10 picoCuries (10 trillionths of
a Curie) per gram are fatal for humans, there are a lot of 'hot' areas
at Area 13 and all over Nevada and Utah that contain dangerous levels of
plutonium that will remain so for the next 240,000 years. Worse, 99% of
the plutonium particulates at Area 13 - and possibly elsewhere - are small
enough to be picked up by wind. And worse, Area 13 hasn't been cleaned
up and the plutonium there keeps on getting resuspended into other areas
that aren't 'protected' by radiation monitoring equipment. The current
monitoring network run by the DOE cannot detect alpha or beta radiation
(e.g., plutonium 239).
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- Downwinder activist and playwright Mary Dickson has for
a long time tried to call attention to the fact that there are downwinders
in northern Utah. Her play 'Exposed' and her many writings testify to
the fact that Salt Lake City and its environs were exposed and people have
died and are dying from that exposure. It is possible that the lack of
data and fallout maps regarding these safety tests has prevented the public
from believing these stories and also the link between safety and other
atomic tests and radiation-induced illnesses in Northern Utah.
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- This data, however, isn't forthcoming from the DOE and
the DOE's stalled environmental cleanup and incomplete environmental analysis
of Area 13 should not go unnoticed. The DOE should complete a new, full-blown
EIS for the Nevada Test Site to address these lingering radiation hotspots,
the dangers of resuspension and the lack of adequate airborne radiation
monitoring in and around downwind communities.
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- (The information cited above is largely from the following
source: 'The American West at Risk' by Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson
and Richard W. Hazlett pp.395-398)
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- info@idealist.ws
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