Reported by:
Vicki Gonzalez
JULY 13, 2015
It’s one of two laboratories of its kind in the country, responsible for protecting the U.S. in the event of a nuclear disaster. On Monday, it left Southern Nevada.
The Environmental Protection Agency based its Mobile Environmental Radiation Laboratory—known as “MERL”—in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas-based MERL was responsible for the western U.S. The EPA decided to move the lab to its other location in Montgomery, Alabama and condense it into one.
In an excerpt of an office memo, EPA Director Mike Flynn said, “We continue to be constrained by tight resources that pose real challenges to maintaining even our base emergency response program.
After considering our current challenges and those we expect in the future, I have decided to maintain one MERL. The reality is we have neither the staff nor the funding to operate two MERLs.”
The EPA downsizing to one MERL for the entire U.S. didn’t sit well for demonstrators outside the facility.
"It would take 2 to 4 days for the other lab to get from the East Coast to the West Coast, and it seems like too long of a time in an emergency," says Ming, who was among the several protesters.
UNLV researcher Dr. Vern Hodge was also outside against the decision. He says the state of California, Nevada and Arizona’s opposition went unanswered.
"It's like a fire truck. If you took all the firetrucks out of California, took them to Alabama and there was a fire, by the time the fire trucks got there it's too late."
On its website, the EPA also says MERL is not intended as a first response in the event of a nuclear emergency and wouldn’t be needed in the first few days.
Although MERL is no longer in Southern Nevada, the Department of Energy has the Remote Sensing Laboratory—called “RSL”—at Nellis Air Force Base. Unlike MERL, RSL is a first responder. The rare nuclear team is first on scene to gather radiological evidence in the water, air and soil, as well as working with law enforcement agencies to determine to best course of action.
The DOE has only one other RSL site at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. RSL routinely monitors Southern Nevada for radiological material, even traveling to Japan during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. The team also had the rare task to scan the White House—there have been more people to the moon than pilots allowed to fly over the White House.
Although the DOE and EPA are separate agencies, they rely on each other in nuclear response. Once RSL gathers radiological data, it would send it to MERL to be analyzed.
A DOE spokesperson says the recent decision to remove MERL from Las Vegas doesn’t impact RSL.