The Nevada Test Site (NTS) was home to nearly 100 atmospheric atomic detonations between 1951-1962 as well as more than 800 underground detonations, which ceased in 1992.
Deep within the NTS lies Yucca Flat. It is scarred by underground detonations eliciting not mushroom clouds but subsidence craters due to obliteration of rock far below the surface. One imprint left behind on Yucca Flat, however, is unlike the others.
In July of 1962 a 104-kiloton thermonuclear device buried deep beneath the desert propelled rock and soil 300 feet skyward. Three seconds after detonation hot gases burst through the ascending alluvial dome as the debris cloud climbed to 12,000 feet. When the dust settled, the experiment was deemed a success given the immense impression left behind.
The Sedan crater is pictured below. The two-lane dirt road at lower right provides a point of reference, and the depressions in the distance are subsidence craters. Sedan measures 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. Standing on a platform built to enhance the view while keeping the careless from careening over the edge, one can inspect the bottom. “Tumbleweeds fill the base of the crater like dust bunnies in the corners of an ill-kept apartment, Phil Patton observes.”
Sedan highlighted the ability to move millions of tons of earth in the blink of an eye. Indeed, the goal was to illustrate the viability of atomic devices for a variety of earth moving projects: the construction of canals, ocean ports, cutting mountain passes, open-pit mining, rerouting of rivers, creation of lakes, even underground to enhance the recoverability of oil and natural gas deposits.
It was anticipated that virtually all of the radioactivity would remain confined within the onsite displaced rock and soil, but the debris cloud was 50 percent larger than predicted and fallout soon traversed the boundaries of the NTS. Radioactive dust and debris moved north before arching northeast over Utah and then over South Dakota, Iowa, and Indiana.
“The dust was so thick at Ely, Nevada, 200 miles away, that the streetlights had to be turned on at four in the afternoon,” Dan O’Neill notes. Sedan also elicited the concern of state health officials in Utah as well as depositing significant radioactivity in the Midwest.
Eleven years after testing began in Nevada and numerous lessons learned the hard way, Sedan was one of the dirtiest detonations in terms of population exposure to radioactive fallout. Further, it was one of the dirtiest in terms of the deposition of cesium-137 as well as radioiodine-which contributes to thyroid cancer.
In response to the nuclear accident in Sellafield, England in 1957–releasing between 16,200-27,000 curies of radioiodine–the United Kingdom restricted milk consumption to reduce the risks to public health. Sedan released 880,000 curies of radioiodine, but the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) never advised the public to avoid milk.
The Sedan crater is evidence of human agency in tandem with the agency of nature. Human agency was key but so too was the force of matter, and fallout from Sedan forged connections over space and time between the animate and the inanimate, the nonhuman and the human, the institutional and the individual. Fallout possesses energy in a variety of chemical concoctions and the propensity to evoke ecological and biophysical change in both an acute and crescive manner.
From a contemporary perspective, atomic geoengineering, as embodied by the Sedan detonation, appears absurd, if not insane, but it was conceived at a point in time when advances in science and technology appeared limitless even as the contradictions of novel science and technology were increasingly difficult to ignore. As enacted through atomic technology the unforeseen and unanticipated is expressed on a correspondingly grander scale.
And it is the downwinders, living in the shadow of the NTS, who confronted a disproportionate burden as a consequence of radioactive fallout emanating from Nevada even as fallout dispersed throughout many other parts of the country, as well.
For more information:
Scott. Kirsch, Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
Atomic Energy Commission, “Statement on the Results of Project Sedan,” July 7, 1962.
John S. Kelly, “Moving Earth and Rock with a Nuclear Device,” Science 138, no. 3536 (1962): 50-51.
Phil Patton, “Journey to the End of the World,” Esquire July, 1995.
Dan O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute (CDC-NCI), A Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population of Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. (Atlanta, GA: CDC, 2002). http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/.
Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani, “Worse Than We Knew,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 53, no. 6 (1997): 46-50.
National Cancer Institute, Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests (Washington, D.C., 1997); see Chapter 2, Table 2.2.
Thousands of people downwind from the NTS died of cancers, yet this issue has never really been aired to the general public. The population in that area is called “low profile population by government documents. While Three Mile Island’s nuclear accident became a clarion call against nuclear energy plants and a household word, Nevada has become the go-to place to dump radioactive debris because, apparently, nobody of any significance lives there. Of course, there is money to be made by storing such waste in Nevada, but is that what the state wants to be known for? America’s trash pit?
Hi Sue,
I’m continually surprised that people are not familiar with the history of nuclear weapons testing and the myriad of other nuclear related activities upon the southwest. It is difficult, to say the least, to learn from this history when many people remain unaware of the degree to which the people and the land have been scarred by the atomic-industrial complex.