By: McKenna Wierman, Brianna Jackson, Vanessa Cordova
Fifty years after two nuclear blasts occurred in Lamar County, 20 miles from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, state health officials say no contamination remains in the groundwater.
A chainlink fence blocks the only road and a brass sign outside the entrance warns future generations of Mississippians not to drill in the area. The 20-acre site of the Tatum Salt Dome nuclear testing area, however, is closed to the public.
During the 1960s, the Department of Defense through the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted Project Dribble in the geological structure known as the Tatum Salt Dome in Lamar County, Mississippi. Project Dribble consisted of two nuclear detonations: the Salmon Event in 1964 and the Sterling Event in 1966. According to the Tatum Salt Dome Test Site Descriptive Study of April 1995, conducted by the DOE, environmental monitoring activities have been conducted at the site since the first detonation took place in 1964.
The results of the monitoring showed that no health hazard to Lamar County residents was identified because the water was not used for drinking.
The Mississippi State Department of Health has concluded that over the past 50 years since the nuclear testing at the Tatum Salt Dome, there is not a great enough amount of radioactive materials to harm people or animals. In fact, in 2010 the land was considered safe enough to be given back to the state of Mississippi and is currently being used as a wildlife reserve.
The State Department is tasked with the job of testing the site’s water, ground, vegetation, and air for radioactive materials. As time has passed and no cause for alarm has been found, the area being tested has diminished. Now, the department only tests the water that comes from the aquifers directly on top of the salt dome. BJ Smith, director of radiology at the MSDH, says that in most of the wells there is absolutely no trace of radioactive elements. In the others, they found less tritium than found in FDA approved drinking water.
Initially, the DOE claimed that no health issues occurred from the nuclear testing, but one newspaper uncovered that one worker had health issues and the government had to pay the medical expenses. The name of the individual as well as the health issues they received treatment for remain undisclosed to the public.
Several times, the United States government returned to the blast site and found that the site did become contaminated after the blasts. According to the DOE Office of Legacy Management, the radioactive remnants of Project Dribble are buried 2,660 feet deep underground, in a test cavity made of impermeable salt, which provides sufficient isolation to prevent the materials from leaking into other layers of rock or groundwater.
Contaminated and radioactive soils were either removed from the site and transported to nuclear waste storage facilities in Nevada, treated for contamination, or buried and replaced with healthy soil after the nuclear testing concluded. Regular soil sampling over the years eventually concluded in 2010 that there were no longer any traces of nuclear radiation or contamination in the topsoil at the Tatum Salt Dome.
Despite the results yielded from rigorous testing over the years, Lamar County residents complained about health related issues long after the blasts occurred. To calm residents, a water pipeline was built to bring in water from outside of the area, though testing indicated that the water in Lamar County was already safe.
According to the Salmon Test Site Radiological Monitoring Report 2013, STS’s environmental monitoring program started because of its main concern, tritium. Naturally tritium occurs in nature, but ever since the Salmon and Sterling nuclear detonations of 1964 the amount of tritium released into nature has significantly increased because of the weapons tests. Tritium is not dangerous externally but it is a radiation hazard when inhaled or ingested. The health risks of tritium include increased chance of cancer and genetic abnormalities in future generations. Through rainfall approximately 100 million curies of tritium are found on oceans and lakes. After the nuclear testing about 1,900 million curies were added to the environment raising health concerns toward the water supply. Later maximum contaminant levels in the Safe Drinking Water Regulations were applied by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The average annual concentration of beta particle-emitting man- made radionuclides in drinking water shall not produce an annual dose equivalent to the total body or any internal organ greater than four millirem per year,” U. S. Environmental Protection Agency said.
Radiological Monitoring Annual Reports from the Salmon Test Site conducted over the past 30 years state that during the November 1983 annual water sampling, a number of monitored locations had elevated levels of tritium. However, the most likely explanation was that it was due to the dry conditions on the site. Tritium concentrations tends to be high during the drier months of the year. An automated rain gauge was installed near the site to accurately measure rainfall but was later discontinued. The eight years of data collected confirmed the dry weather theory sufficiently. Over the years, there has been a definite downward trend from tritium concentrations.
In addition to testing the water for radioactive contaminates, the DOE was also responsible at one time for monitoring the cancer rates of Lamar County residents in order to rule out the risk of radioactive exposure to Mississippi citizens. Overtime, the officials at the MSDH said there have been no reports of cancer related directly to the nuclear testing.
“We’ve always done testing in the area to see if there was risk,” Smith said. “There’s no evidence that there was any threats to public health, and we’ve monitored the site with the Department of Energy grant to assure that there was no public health threats.”
Smith mentioned a study conducted by the DOE commissioned by Mississippi Gov., Trent Lott, which concluded there was no evidence to suggest residents in Lamar County suffered from higher cancer rates than normal, compared to cancer rates within the rest of the state. Beginning in 1987, the Salmon Test Site Radiological Monitoring Annual reports mention Lott’s request for the DOE to “perform an epidemiological cancer study in Lamar County, and evaluate the adequacy of their exchange of information with residents in the STS area (pg 9).”
The text goes on to describe how because of concerns, Lott requested the DOE increase the amount of information it makes available to area residents and performs environmental study of the site conditions. In 2010, however, the text in the report was amended to include “the cancer study was conducted, but was inconclusive (pg 9).”
However, during an interview Smith was careful to point out that he was only an employee of the MSDH, and had no background whatsoever in epidemiology. But the fact remains that the study conducted by the DOE of Lamar County residents found no evidence to suggest that Lamar County residents were suffering from any increase in cancer as a result of nuclear radiation from Project Dribble.
Overall, as long as testing has occurred, the MSDH reports that no department that has ever held responsibility for maintaining the site, including the AEC, DOE and the MSDH has ever found evidence to suggest there are unsafe levels of nuclear radiation or tritium contamination at the Tatum Salt Dome.