Question of the Day - 27 May 2018

Millions of people live in and visit Las Vegas with no untoward effects that have been identified by cancer clusters or other geographic or epidemiological evidence. In fact, the old Nevada Test Site (NTS) has become something of a tourist attraction.

The primary radiation concern in recent years was the federal government’s determination to ship nuclear waste through Las Vegas, en route to a nuclear repository deep in the bowels of Yucca Mountain. Former Sen. Harry Reid was able to derail the project, but eternal vigilance is the price of a nuclear-free Vegas.

It was not always thus. Between 1951 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, 100 atmospheric detonations occurred at the NTS. There were also a staggering 921 underground tests between 1957 and 1992.

Las Vegans were used as guinea pigs, encouraged to get up early and watch the blasts, few knowing that the federal government was measuring the impact of fallout on them, according to declassified documents from the Federal Civil Defense Administration. “Subsequent epidemiological studies have shown a significant rise in the incidence of leukemia and thyroid cancer in the populations living downwind from the nuclear testing site,” says one historical website.

Local media were complicit in the government deception. “‘Baby’ A-Blast May Provide Facts on Defense Against Atomic Attack,” read a headline in the Las Vegas Sun and, when a blast went awry on March 24, 1955, the Las Vegas Review-Journal declared, “Fallout on Las Vegas and vicinity following this morning's detonation was very low and without any effects on health.” As if the editorial board could know the long-term effects. 

Ted Hartwell, of the Community Environmental Monitoring Program of the Desert Research Institute, says that nowadays, “The short answers to questions about Las Vegas safety are ‘very safe’ and that radiation levels in Las Vegas, which are almost entirely a product of natural sources, are generally lower than many other places across the U.S.”

For instance, while Las Vegas may sit 2,000-some-odd feet above sea level, mile-high Denver is far more vulnerable to naturally occurring radiation bombarding us from the sun and outer space -- there's less atmosphere to act as a filter.

Most of the radiation you’d encounter at the Test Site, continues Hartwell, is “less than a tenth of one percent of what we’re exposed to on a 24/7 basis. Most of Las Vegas’s background radiation is accounted for by the local geology — radon gas, which accounts for half the dose from natural sources."

Citing the most radioactive place on Earth, Basmar, Iran, Hartwell explains, “The background-radiation levels are 100 times the levels that we experience here in Las Vegas. And even though they’re that much higher, there’s still no health effects to the local population from radioactivity.”

He adds that fallout from the large-scale, open-air, A-bomb tests conducted by the Soviet Union and by the U.S. in the Pacific Ocean during the Cold War was greater than all the roughly 1,000 ‘shots’ at the Nevada Test Site combined. Nowadays, “The longer-lived isotopes like Cesium 137 aren't there in sufficient quantities to contribute to the dose we experience today.”

When the tests moved to the southern Nevada desert, recalled former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson, “People in southern Utah were mainly concerned with making a living and I don't recall anyone being too upset about the brilliant flashes and thunder-like blasts that were part of the 1953 atomic testing. The Upshot-Knothole series, conducted from March to June 1953, included the 'Dirty Harry' exposure that carried an enormous amount of debris downwind over southern Utah. People were concerned about the sheep deaths that occurred in May 1953, but when the Atomic Energy Commission said there was nothing to worry about, we all just shrugged our shoulders. We were used to accepting whatever the government said, especially during that very nationalistic period.”

But the fallout created a serious long-term situation as it carried well past Las Vegas. Although the government tried to shield Los Angeles and to a lesser extent Las Vegas from the effects of the blast by detonating bombs when the wind was to the east — creating a class of victims known as “downwinders” — the move wasn't without its consequences. “Within three to five years after atmospheric testing, leukemia and other radiation-caused cancers appeared in residents of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada living in areas where nuclear fallout had occurred. Communities in which childhood leukemia was rare or unknown had clusters of cases in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” reads the State of Utah’s historical website.

Tomorrow: More on radioactivity in Las Vegas and why there’s less here than in taking an airplane flight.