Divine Strake was cancelled on February 22, 2007, and vast portions of this site are outdated and no longer relevant.
On July 24, 2009, the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) made official its intention in the U.S. Federal Register to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Nevada Test Site and Off-Site Locations in the State of Nevada. The EIS will replace the existing EIS from 1996. The NNSA is the same agency that collaborated in 2006 and 2007 with the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in the 'Divine Strake' experiment.
Divine Strake was a proposed Department of Defense-sponsored 700-ton chemical explosives test at Nevada Test Site that, according to budget documents, would have simulated the blast of a low-yield nuclear weapon on a hardened underground bunker.
The test was cancelled in February 2007 following a public outcry – culminating in thousands of citizen-emailed comments lodged with the NNSA - over growing fears that Cold War fallout at the Nevada Test Site would be resuspended and drift off-site from the effects of the 700-ton blast.
Divine Strake was just one of many tests as part of a DTRA program announced in a 2002 supplement document to the 1996 EIS. In that supplement, no environmental review of DTRA’s activities was ever conducted and the public was never given a chance to review the intricacies of the program, choose and consider alternatives, or participate and comment in a transparent evaluation process. The only information provided to the public was a cursory, very brief mention in the supplement document about these actions.
The NNSA in 2002 and years following applied a protocol called “categorical exclusion” to exempt the DTRA program’s blasting activities – except for Divine Strake - from 'additional' NEPA review. The NNSA proceeded with the assumption that these testing activities were bounded by the 1996 EIS, whereas they were not.
Per NEPA, 'Categorical exclusion' is a 'category of actions which do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment ... and ... for which, therefore, neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental impact statement is required.' (40 CFR 1508.4) Therefore, the choice by NEPA officials to make eligible these DTRA tests for 'categorical exclusion' was erroneous for the simple reason these activities, conducted on the soils of the most contaminated area on the Earth, were far from having insignificant affects. 'Categorical exclusion' provides the least, the lowest, the most cursory, nontransparent form of review, and, essentially, denies the public of any information and oversight of NNSA actions. It is safe to assume that since 2002 dozens of DTRA surface blasts were allowed by NNSA officials without any public awareness. This testing exposed the downwind population to unknown additional levels of radioactive emissions.
When the DTRA announced Divine Strake's cancellation on February 22, 2007, they stated their intention to "develop advanced analysis techniques and conduct confirmatory experiments at a much smaller scale to assist in developing new capabilities to defeat underground facilities." The DTRA's decision in that statement to conduct more surface-tests at the Nevada Test Site is certain; it is 'clear and unequivocal from that press release,' wrote Nevada lawyer Robert Hager in a federal motion on May 11, 2007.
The DTRA's legal representatives in the Department of Justice later denied in federal court any plans for any federal action (these smaller tests), however the DTRA has never mentioned it would never conduct these or other surface-explosive tests. However, these (and other) smaller-scale 'confirmatory' tests have never been defined in terms of yield, timing or environmental impacts.
Idealist feels that it is imperative that citizens formerly concerned with Divine Strake consider the facts that (a) further Divine Strake-like testing has been announced - and 'decided' - and (b) there is still no environmental document – no scientific analysis - to assess the impacts of further surface-testing at the Nevada Test Site on the environment or peoples downwind of the test site.
We implore concerned persons to make use of this unique opportunity during this EIS process to advise the NNSA to focus their efforts in the new EIS to evaluate the environmental health effects of small and large surface-scale tests like Divine Strake. Although the EIS is not the correct venue for stopping these additional tests, it is the EIS process that should, and must, subject these testing activities to greater scrutiny, transparency and analysis. Legal action or grassroots protest, as in the past with Divine Strake, may be required if the EIS process fails to ultimately address the environmental significance of additional surface testing.
At Idealist, we fully admonish the NNSA for that agency's abuse of loopholes in NEPA that allowed officials to exempt (categorically exclude) past DTRA surface-testing at the NTS from all levels of public scrutiny and transparent environmental review. These abuses of categorical exclusion, if unchecked, may lead to a growing trend of treating greater classes of NTS actions with reduced environmental review and poorer transparency.
The NNSA should not have allowed these tests without subjecting them to greater environmental review, whether in the form of an Environmental Assessment, an Impact Statement, or a Supplement to the 1996 EIS. The NNSA's abuse of the Categorical Exclusion protocol violated both the spirit, if not the letter, of NEPA and the public's trust.
More reading:
The
Un-killable Nevada Bomb Test
http://www.idealist.ws/divinestrake.php
http://idealist.ws/Comments%20on%20Draft%20SA.pdf
http://idealist.ws/nevada.php
Was Divine Strake Safe? Looking Down DTRA's Barrell. Divine Strake: A Warning of Things to Come. Baby Divine Strakes?