U.S. Wildlife Finds Safe Haven on Dangerous Cold War-era Weapons Sites

Tom Kenworthy
USA Today

August 29, 2001

Whit Gibbons opens the throttle on his small skiff and races across the
Savannah River, slamming to a stop in a tangle of tree branches hanging
over the south bank. In the bow, Cameron Young stabs at a branch and
comes up triumphantly with a squirming—and very large—brown
water snake.

For Gibbons, a University of Georgia ecologist, and Young, a graduate student, it's just another critter-rich day in one of the nation's most unusual outdoor labs.

The two herpetologists are among dozens of scientists attached to the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a research facility in the middle of a 300-square-mile (800-square-kilometer) federal property carved out as a nuclear weapons plant site a half-century ago. For much of the Cold War, the Savannah River Site, 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Augusta, Georgia, produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs.

As a result, it is one of the most heavily polluted places on earth.

But in a grand irony, this facility—along with a handful of other large weapons plants in Colorado, Washington state, Idaho and Tennessee that were walled off from the outside world for decades—also is a treasure-trove of biological diversity.

One unintended benefit of the race to produce weapons of mass destruction has been the protection of huge islands of wildlife habitat. With the arms race largely over, these sites, for all their ghastly contaminants, are increasingly being recognized as key refuges for wildlife largely unaffected by the nuclear and chemical pollution.

Ninety percent of the Savannah River site has been virtually undisturbed for decades. It contains a rich mix of ecosystems: hardwood and pine forests, Carolina bay wetlands, cypress-tupelo swamps.

The plant and animal life is breathtaking—and has been documented by the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory since the early 1950s, with most research conducted outside of highly contaminated areas. Here, there are more than 240 species of birds, more than 100 species of reptiles and amphibians, and nearly 100 species of freshwater fish. A creek running through the site has the greatest diversity of invertebrates of any in the Western Hemisphere.

The largest alligator ever found in South Carolina—more than 13 feet (4 meters) long—came from here, and the largemouth bass are an angler's dream. These are not nuclear mutants, simply specimens grown large because they are not hunted or fished. ''It's a pretty simple formula,'' Gibbons says. ''The best protection for the environment is no people.''

What about having all this surrounding a plant struggling to deal with 35 million gallons (130 million liters) of high-level nuclear waste and a devil's brew of toxic chemicals? ''It's ironical, it's paradoxical,'' he says.

But hardly unique.

On the outskirts of Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was built by the Army during World War II to produce mustard gas and incendiary weapons. Later, agricultural chemicals were produced there, and at the height of the Cold War, nerve gas. Now, even as a U.S. $2 billion environmental cleanup proceeds, the 27-square-mile (70-square-kilometer) arsenal has been transformed into a national wildlife refuge.

Undisturbed Prairie

A fabulous example of largely undisturbed short-grass prairie, the arsenal is visited by up to 100 bald eagles in the winter and has thriving colonies of prairie dogs. Bird life abounds, including ferruginous hawks, burrowing owls and mountain plovers. Other attractions: mule deer with trophy-size racks and some of the best pond fishing in Colorado (catch-and-release only, because of the threat of contamination).

As the Army oversees the cleanup—including disposal of a handful of nerve gas canisters found recently—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is restoring thousands of acres of native grasslands, giving escorted tours to tens of thousands of visitors and monitoring wildlife for contamination.

On a recent tour, refuge manager Dean Rundle pauses by a lake and marvels as two Swainson's hawks engage in a courtship ritual, locking their talons in the air and tumbling toward the ground.

A short drive to the west lies the Rocky Flats nuclear site, where plutonium components were produced until the mid-1990s. Contaminated by thousands of cubic meters of radioactive and hazardous wastes, Rocky Flats is, like the other weapons sites, on the federal government's Superfund list of priority cleanups. The estimated price for restoration: nearly $7 billion.

But Rocky Flats' location, where the plains meet the Rocky Mountains, provides habitat for numerous species, including cougar, deer and the threatened Preble's meadow jumping mouse. To preserve those resources, Colorado Senator Wayne Allard, a Republican, and Representative Mark Udall, a Democrat, have proposed that Rocky Flats be designated a federal wildlife refuge once the cleanup is completed.

The story is similar at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. Created during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, the 586-square-mile (1, 518-square-kilometer) site on the Columbia River housed reactors for producing plutonium.

Hanford contains some of the best undisturbed ''shrub-steppe'' habitat in the Columbia River basin. In addition, the only undammed stretch of that mighty river—the Hanford Reach—flows by, providing spawning habitat for the Columbia's healthiest population of wild chinook salmon, the famed ''upriver brights.''

Late last year, President Clinton set aside more than half of Hanford's property, nearly 200,000 acres (80,000 hectares) including the Hanford Reach, as a national monument.

Misguided Cleanup?

Some believe that the Department of Energy's cleanup program for its many nuclear sites could threaten these extraordinary wildlife resources by eventually opening the areas to far greater public access and even development. The effort is estimated to cost $147 billion through 2070.

It would be better to adopt a ''waste to wilderness'' policy that would permit a less thorough cleanup and manage these areas as wildlife refuges, wrote Robert Nelson, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative public policy institute. He projects savings up to $50 billion.

While it is unlikely the public would endorse scaling back the cleanup strategy, excluding the public from these sites has been the key to their success as havens for wildlife. At Savannah River, for example, the public is kept away except for an annual deer hunt.

As with other nuclear sites where secrecy was paramount, Savannah River is a vast property with only a small portion devoted to nuclear production facilities.

''Only 10 percent of it was ever used for industrial purposes,'' says Paul Bertsch, director of the ecology lab. Fish, wildlife and human visitors are largely unaffected by the pollution because high-level contamination is localized in waste tanks and other isolated structures, and lower-level wastes are ''inaccessible to fish and wildlife'' because they are in groundwater and beneath the surface.

Some of the most important research at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, where scientists have produced more than 2,500 academic publications, involves monitoring for radiation effects on wildlife. At Savannah's Par Pond—named for the P and R reactors—researchers have done exhaustive studies on bass and alligators to determine whether the animals are affected by radiation or the release of hot water from the plant's nuclear reactors. Despite jokes about ''glowing frogs,'' Gibbons says there is no evidence to date of genetic damage to wildlife.

With the reactors shut down, Par Pond is home to more wintering ruddy ducks than the rest of South Carolina combined.

Because of its long isolation, the Savannah River Site also provides unparalleled opportunities to examine plants and animals in a habitat as close to natural as almost anywhere in the world. The forests, fields, and swamps here provide sanctuary for threatened and endangered species, including red-cockaded woodpeckers, wood storks and the smooth purple coneflower. Leading a visitor on a tour of the site, Gibbons points out an unremarkable-looking patch of forest and notes that it harbors one of the few coral snake populations in South Carolina.

''Many, many species are localized like that,'' he says. ''Put a parking lot in there, and they're gone.''

Copyright 2001 USA TODAY