The record suggests otherwise. In studying Area 25 to determine how former Atomic Energy Commission workers and contractors with cancer may have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation there, investigators for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that “two nuclear reactors” were in fact destroyed there. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors and transport of radioactive material, the area was extensively contaminated with enriched uranium, niobium, cobalt, and cesium,” the authors of the report concluded in 2008.
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,” Dewar wrote. As for the records from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, Dewar said that “many SNPO veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in 1973” and that “in particular, the chronology file of Harold Finger, Milton Klein and David Gabriel, SNPO’s directors, would [be] invaluable” in determining the complete story on NERVA. When reached for comment, Harold Finger clarified that he left the program as director in 1968. “I have no knowledge of any meltdown,” Finger said, suggesting that his former deputy Milton Klein might know more. “I left the program as director in 1971,” Klein said, “and do not have any information about what happened to NERVA in the end.”
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.”
Twenty-eight years after NERVA’s questionable end at Jackass Flats, shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the radiated land at Area 25 started to serve a new purpose when the Department of Homeland Security and the military began training exercises there—including how to deal with cleaning up after a terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon. T. D. Barnes served as a consultant on several of these endeavors.
NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan discussed the WMD training that goes on at the test site in a government film that plays at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders,” Morgan said of the test site, “because the site offers real radiation they can’t get anywhere else.” Still, the National Nuclear Security Administration declined to elaborate on how, exactly, this “real radiation” that contaminated Area 25 occurred.
Perhaps in the early 1970s, the thinking at the Atomic Energy Commission was that one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down in an American city. Were this to happen, the commission could have argued, it would be a good thing to know what to expect. By 1972, the nuclear energy industry had experienced five “boom year(s),” according to Atomic Energy Commission archives. Without any kind of regulatory arm in place, the commission had been promoting and developing nuclear reactor “units,” which are the fuel cores that provide energy for nuclear power plants. By the end of 1967, the commission had placed thirty units around the country. The following year, that number jumped to ninety-one, and by 1972 there were one hundred and sixty nuclear reactor units that the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of overseeing at power plants around the nation.