Nevada's Environmental Legacy: Progress or Plunder

CHAPTER SIX

When the United States confronted its most challenging decisions in the twentieth century, it often looked to Nevada’s open spaces for solutions. During World War II and the Cold War, southern Nevada became a preferred site for feverish military spending.Thisdesertstatewasexceptionalinthevarietyofdefenserelated enterprises tested on, under, and above its terrain. Nevada enjoyed quick, profitable contracts and short-term benefits; it learned belatedly that it had inherited another toxic legacy as well. As Las Vegas became the hometown of Nellis Air Force Base, the largest fighter-plane training facility in the nation, one million acres were withdrawn from the public domain in southern Nevada to allow for bombing and gunnery practice. Then, in the 1950s, the federal government preempted a stretch of desert only sixty-five miles from Las Vegas for the Nevada Test Site. This became the world’s hottest, most deadly nuclear garbage dump. Even more ominously, in the 1980s, because of the enormous stretches of seemingly barren terrain still available on the leeward side of the southern Sierra Nevada, Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas became the preferred choice of the profit-making nuclear industries as the place to bury the most dangerous residue of their c h a p t e r s i x Faustian Laboratory of the Nuclear Age, 1950–1992 8 1 toxic refuse—thousands of tons of radioactive waste. (We will discuss this issue in the next chapter.) Thus, the skies above Nevada, the surface area of tens of thousands of square miles, and the depths of its southern deserts were taken by the federal government for awesome missions that had little regard for the fragile environment. We must circle back again to earlier history to put this decision in perspective. The Nevada Test Site The opening of the nuclear age during World War II spawned not only atomic bombs like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 but also a new era of scientific research on additional military uses of this form of energy. Inquiries about possible peaceful applications of atomic power followed. Over the next half century, as the U.S. government and private industry explored the potential uses and dangers of nuclear energy, they looked to southern Nevada for the same reasons that had existed in the 1940s when the air force located its tactical fighter base there—vast amounts of public land under federal control. President Harry Truman announced the beginning of atomic testing in Nevada in 1951, two years after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. For more than forty years, between January 1951 and October 1992, the center for American nuclear testing was a swath of terrain, carved from the Las Vegas–Tonopah Bombing and Gunnery Range and two desolate sites near Fallon in northwestern Nevada. The Nevada site initially contained 350 square miles; a series of expansions added another 1,000 square miles to the testing zone by 1968. The area was presumed to be a wasteland, chosen for its remoteness from population centers, for the favorable desert climatic conditions, and for its relatively secure geographical location, before a few sensitive Nevadans began to understand the implications of testing. Las Vegas quickly felt the monetary benefits and enjoyed the new attention that followed the first tests in the atmosphere. Glad8 2 n e v a d a ’ s e n v i r o n m e n t a l l e g a c y win Hill of the New York Times, who visited the vicinity after five explosionshadbeendetonated,madeoneofthefirstreportsonthe new experimentation. He considered the little city of some twentyfive thousand people, which he called “one of the most amiably raffish communities in the nation,” an odd place for the conducting of such important scientific experiments. Yet Las Vegans took the new “industry” in stride and noticed an increase rather than a decline in visitors. The Nevada Test Site became the world’s most active center for the testing of nuclear devices. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, at least 1,820 known nuclear tests were conducted throughout the world from the beginning of the atomic age in 1945 until the end of 1989. In this forty-five-year span, the United States acknowledged testing more than half the number detonated throughout the world and approximately 280 more than the Soviet Union. Of this number, U.S. government spokesmen affirmed, about 100 had been detonated on or...