Another wildfire has started at the Nevada National Security Site, with smoke sighted only a couple weeks after responders contained the 24,000-acre Cherrywood fire that burned for about a month at the test site.
In a series of press releases on Wednesday, the site reported “multiple” new fires in the western section of the roughly 1,300-square-mile desert complex, of which two were still burning at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing: one in the site’s Area 16, burning over an estimated 160 acres, and another in Area 29, at an estimated 23 acres.
A team of firefighters from the site and the federal Bureau of Land Management have responded to the fires. According to the site, an unidentified person or persons reported smoke on Tuesday afternoon, local time, after which responders discovered blazes in Area 16, Area 29 and Area 30. By Wednesday evening, the fires had been “reduced” to Area 16 and Area 29, the site said.
Area 16 hosted six nuclear tests while area 30 hosted one. There were no tests at area 29, according to a DOE document.
“[T]he fire in Area 16 remains at 2.5 kilometers from the edge of the contaminated area,” the Nevada National Security Site wrote in a press release distributed on Wednesday evening.
While the site said that “rigorous” modelling shows there would be no risk to members of the public offsite even if the fire were to “burn completely through this area … out of an abundance of caution, a radiological response team is conducting continuous on-site monitoring in this area. Additional air sampling stations have been deployed with high volume sensors in the fire areas.”
Wildfires are a fact of life for DOE’s desert sites, and summer 2021 could be especially difficult. The record heatwave in the Pacific Northwest has the Hanford Site bracing for rolling blackouts and fires, and Los Alamos National Laboratory is sitting on what an official at the lab’s legacy cleanup contractor recently called a “tinderbox.”
