Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

In March of 2005, we wrote about efforts to open a former nuclear blast site for natural gas drilling (see “Drilling could wake a sleeping giant“). In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 40-kiloton bomb 8,400 feet underground at the Project Rulison site in western Colorado. The experiment was an attempt to release natural gas, but the gas produced was too radioactive to be used. Thirty-five years later, energy companies began extracting natural gas from the area around the site. Locals worried that the operations might contaminate their drinking water with radioactive isotopes.

Now the long-awaited report on the odds of radioactive contamination has been released. The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent has the story:

Under the new study, the DOE used conceptual flow and transport models to simulate tritium migration. The agency says the most likely pathway for radioactive contamination from the detonation zone to the surface would be via a producing gas well, through water vapor tainted by tritium.

The … study found there was a 95 percent chance of no contamination by (tritium) at a hypothetical well producing gas just outside the current drilling exclusion area at the site.

With 27 wells now pumping away within three miles of the blast hole, that seems to be good news. But even a five percent chance might be too great of a risk, considering what our reporter Jennie Lay found:

Tritium is the “primary contaminant of concern over the next 100 years, because it is one of the most mobile radiologic contaminants and is found in abundance” at the test site, according to a March 2000 Energy Department report. The report also notes that “no proven and cost-effective technologies exist for the removal of radioactive contamination from groundwater at these depths.”