nuclear-news

USA secret nuclear tests and coverups

America’s Secret Nuclear Test Revealed in Area 51, The Daily Beast, by Annie Jacobsen 13 May 11In her explosive new book, Area 51, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen reveals for the first time secret nuclear tests and a nuclear space rocket meltdown. Plus, she explains how she uncovered the real story.

America’s Secret Nuclear Test In 1957, with the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. This dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare scenario first. The organization needed to do this in a controlled environment, away from the urban masses, in total secrecy. No one outside the project, absolutely no one, could know…

… “Translocation of soil, earthworms’ ingestion of plutonium, could turn out to be a significant influence, intentional or unintentional, in the rehabilitation of weapon- accident environment.” In other words, plutonium-carrying earthworms that had passed through Area 13, or birds that ate those earthworms, could at some point in the future get to a garden down the road or trees in another field. “The idea of an entirely separate program on ecology in Area 13 had occurred to [names unclear] in the summer of 1957,” wrote Shreve, “but the AEP/ UCLA logical group to undertake the investigation was too committed on Operation Plumbbob to consider the responsibility.” The twenty- nine nuclear bombs about to blow in the rest of the Plumbbob series would take precedent over any kind of effort to contain future harm done by the first test in the series, the Project 57 dirty bomb.

….What might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this otherwise shockingly outrageous test—namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup—was ignored until it was too late. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made. …….

Disaster Over Spain

On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen Bombs—with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons—collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside………In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially, working in the dark……..The group cleaning up the dispersed plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G. It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-industrial complex in full swing.

For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over, more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and excreted somewhere else “will never be known.” As for the missing hydrogen bomb, for forty-four days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing bomb,” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been lost.

Nuclear Space Rocket Melts Down

In June of 1965, disaster struck again, this time on U.S. soil. Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site, which was now being used as the site for a project called NERVA: Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application—a nuclear powered spaceship that could get men to Mars and back in a matter of months. An incarnation of the nuclear rocket engine, code-named Phoebus, had been running at full power for ten minutes when “suddenly it ran out of LH2 [liquid hydrogen and] overheated in the blink of an eye,” explain[s/ed] former Department of Energy employee James A. Dewar. The nuclear rocket reactor first ejected large chunks of its radioactive fuel out into the open air. Then “the remainder fused together, as if hit by a giant welder.” Laymen would call this a meltdown.

Originally, Los Alamos tried to send robots into Area 25 to conduct the decontamination, but according to Dewar the robots were “slow and inefficient.” Eventually humans were sent in, driving truck-mounted vacuum cleaners to suck up deadly contaminants. Declassified Atomic Energy Commission photographs show workers in protective gear and gas masks picking up radioactive chunks with long metal tongs. Like many Atomic Energy Commission officials, Dewar saw the accident as “achieving some objectives.” That “while certainly unfortunate, unplanned, unwanted and unforeseen,” he believed that “calling the accident ‘catastrophic’ mocks the meaning of the word.” The cleanup process took four hundred people two months to complete.

So what happened to NERVA in the end? When Thornton “T.D.” Barnes worked on NERVA, in 1968, the project was well advanced. But space travel was on the wane. By 1970, the public’s infatuation with getting a man to Mars had made an abrupt about-face. Funding dried up, and NASA projects began shutting down. “We did develop the rocket,” Barnes says. “We do have the technology to send man to Mars this way. But environmentally, we could never use a nuclear- powered rocket on Earth in case it blew up on takeoff. So the NERVA was put to bed.” That depends how one defines put to bed.

President Nixon canceled the program, and it officially ended on January 5, 1973. Several employees who worked at the NERVA facility at Jackass Flats say the nuclear rocket program came to a dramatic, cataclysmic end, one that has never before been made public….

The full data relating to the last tests conducted on the NERVA nuclear rocket remain classified as Restricted Data and the Department of Energy has repeatedly declined to release the documents. Atomic Energy Commission records are “well organized and complete but unfortunately, most are classified or kept in secure areas that limit public access,” according to Dewar.

As for the records from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, NERVA’s executive program office in Washington DC, Dewar said that “many SNPO veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in 1973” ………” In January of 2002, as part of the Nevada Environmental Restoration Project, the National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a study regarding proposed cleanup of the contaminated land at Area 25. The report revealed that the following radioactive elements were still present at that time: “cobalt-60 (Co-60); strontium-90 (Sr-90); yttrium-90 (Y-90); niobium-94 (Nb-94); cesium- 137 (Cs-137); barium-137m (Ba-137m); europium-152,-154, and -155 (Eu-152, Eu-154, and Eu-155); uranium-234,-235, -238 (U-234,U-235, U-238); plutonium-239/240 (Pu-239/240); and americium-241 (Am-241),” and that these radioactive contaminants “may have percolated into underlying soil.”……Excerpted from the book Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-13/americas-secret-nuclear-test-revealed-in-area-51-by-annie-jacobsen/#

May 15, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA