Yucca Mountain, which borders the test site, is 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. I don't know if it has any particular significance. But after the presentation, Reid and Bryan, in a joint statement, said the discovery is more evidence that be entombed in Yucca Mountain. If what we have seen before bears out, there is a lot of work which needs to be done on radiation and ground water before anybody starts storing any high-level nuclear waste here. Ten percent of the waste would come from military sources and would be solidified before it is stored as glass logs.
Plutonium is one of the radioactive waste components.
Rick Nielsen, executive director of Citizen Alert, a statewide environmental group, said the report signals an alarm about the future quality of ground water in the Southern Nevada region. It shows how easily our ground water can become contaminated. Nielsen said scientists need to determine how long it will take for the contamination to migrate off the test site, a question Kersting and Thompson said they are trying to answer. We don't know. The study was part of an ongoing monitoring program at the test site that began in 1973.