Round 2 at Amchitka

Environmentalists predicted earthquakes or other disasters when the Atomic Energy Commission exploded a one-megaton nuclear device on Alaska's Amchitka Island in 1969. In fact, the feared mishap did not occur. Now the AEC is back for another round, and so are the environmentalists.

Last week a group called the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., and co-chaired by Nuclear Physicist John Gofman, former U.S. Senator Charles Goodell and New York Poet Leonore Marshall, brought suit in Washington's U.S. district court against the AEC. The suit noted that the underground tests, to be detonated on Amchitka in October, will be five times more powerful than the 1969 blast. It charged that such an explosion would do irreparable harm to the environment and asked the court to stop the test.

Radioactive Leaks. Specifically, the committee and its seven co-plaintiffs (including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and SANE) claim that the blast may trigger "a succession of earthquakes" (fault lines run from Alaska through Southern California), tsunamis or earthquake-produced tidal waves of "unpredictable size and direction," contaminate the surrounding ocean with radioactive materials and leak poisonous debris into the atmosphere.

This debris, say the plaintiffs, could travel outside the U.S., thus violating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Even if no materials escape initially from the 6,150-ft.-deep shafts, they argue, later seismic action could shake them loose. Most serious is the claim that the AEC has in fact broken the law by not filing an adequate environmental-impact statement on the test as required by the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act.

The AEC argues that the test, on which $ 167 million has been spent thus far, will not harm the environment; further, it is vital to the development of weapons for the nation's defense. While radioactive debris has escaped from 68 of 253 underground nuclear tests held in Nevada, AEC officials contend that no leaks have been recorded for tests of more than 200 kilotons. On the other hand, they admit that water contaminated with radioactive tritium could seep through open rock to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean any time within three to 1,000 years. Such uncertainty hardly reassured the concerned environmentalists.

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