nuclear-news

“The Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission — precursor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy — picked as their test site the Tatum Salt Dome southwest of Hattiesburg,” Schleifstein wrote. “It was huge, about a mile across, and relatively remote. Only about 250 families lived within five miles of ground zero.”

Three more blasts — one nuclear, two non-nuclear — followed over the next four years before researchers decided to abandon the site. Officials would later conduct a a massive clean-up effort, dumping 1.3 million gallons of contaminated water and 10,700 cubic yards of contaminated soil into the cavity.

Workers who participated in the clean-up said they were exposed to high levels of radiation on the job. Bill Teck, the chief of security at the site until 1971, was later diagnosed with skin cancer, which a Veterans Administration pathologist attributed to nuclear radiation.

Today, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality conducts annual tests of the surface water at the Tatum Dome to monitor slowly dropping levels of tritium, a mildly radioactive type of hydrogen that can seep into water supplies near nuclear power plants.

• Read Schleifstein’s full story from 1990.