Radioactivity is leaking into the Bering Sea from a 25-year-old underground nuclear bomb test in Alaska, the environmental group Greenpeace says.
The leakage is occurring on Amchitka Island, a national wildlife refuge that is "extremely rich biologically," said Greenpeace biologist Pamela Miller, who co-discovered the radioactivity during an expedition to the island.The U.S. Department of Energy takes the Greenpeace report "very seriously" and will launch a special investigation, Energy Undersecretary Thomas Grumbley said in a conference call with several reporters Tuesday.
But there's no evidence of an imminent hazard to humans or Pacific fisheries, said Grumbley and the Greenpeace scientists. Located southwest of Alaska, Amchitka Island has no permanent human inhabitants.
Conducted Nov. 6, 1971, the Amchitka blast was the biggest underground nuclear test in U.S. history. Its explosive force equalled 5 million tons (or 5 megatons) of TNT - 385 times as mighty as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Scientists detonated the bomb a mile underground to comply with a 1963 treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
The nuclear test was part of then-President Nixon's controversial Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) project, which aimed to develop nuclear bombs that could explode in the atmosphere to "fry" incoming Soviet missiles.
To calm critics, James Schlesinger, then-chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, took his wife and two daughters to Amchitka for the test, noting that "it's fun for the kids and my wife is delighted to get away from the house for a while."
Although the blast occurred far underground, it jolted Earth's crust so violently that it killed sea otters, either by rupturing their lungs or "driving their eyeballs through the bone behind their sockets," said the 35-page Greenpeace report, released Wednesday.
The bomb was detonated slightly more than a mile deep, which was 1,000 feet too high for safety, said report authors Miller and Norman Buske. As a result, the ground just above the explosion collapsed, forming a mile-wide, 60-foot-deep crater on the surface above the blast. The crater has turned into a lake, now called Cannikin Lake.
Miller and Buske visited Amchitka Island for six days in June, taking soil, water and plant samples. Then they analyzed the samples, checking specifically for two possible signs of radioactivity - emissions of gamma radiation and "alpha" particles.
They found evidence that three highly toxic radioactive substances - plutonium-239, plutonium-240, and americium-241 - "are leaking from the Cannikin blast cavity into White Alice Creek and the Bering Sea."
After meeting with Greenpeace representatives in Washington on Tuesday, Grumbley vowed that agency officials "will immediately go back and take a look at all the data and all the records relevant to the Amchitka (nuclear tests)."
Should any Amchitka documents remain classified, the agency will declassify them, he added.
Miller is former technical coordinator for ocean issues for the state of Washington. Buske is director of the Nuclear Military Monitoring project launched by the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)