Think the waters off Bremerton are safe? Do you trust the French when they say no radiation has leaked from their Mururoa test site in the South Pacific? Norm Buske's sampling activities suggest otherwise.
NORM BUSKE
INTERVIEWED BY ERIC NELSON
THE FREE PRESS
Norm Buske is a research scientist, investigator, citizen-activist, and hellraiser. The principal and chief scientist of Nuclear Military Monitoring (NMM), Buske conducts environmental sampling around the world to verify the claims of governments - including our own - as to their handling of nuclear materials. In 1990, he participated in a Greenpeace campaign to debunk French claims about nuclear testing in the South Pacific. He has also conducted sampling projects at Hanford, Savannah River and, most recently, at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) in Bremerton, where he has detected radiation in Sinclair Inlet. Following his arrest during sampling activities at PSNS last year, Buske was acquitted of criminal trespass by U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer. The Navy has since engaged in emergency rulemaking crafted specifically to prevent Buske from sampling the waters adjacent to PSNS. On September 11, Buske was again arrested for swimming in the restricted area adjacent to PSNS. He goes before Judge Dwyer in November.
Explain what you are trying to do with NMM.
Nuclear Military Monitoring (NMM) is a project of the Tides Foundation. (The program involves) examining military nuclear facilities to check on the veracity of the claims by the nuclear military that everything is OK and that the public should have confidence in them. And the general notion is that this is not true.
It's completely absurd for the United States or any other power to sit on a nuclear arsenal. But it's hard for any citizens to do anything about it. One says, "OK, that is the big picture." But it's so big that one walks away from it. NMM's approach, then, is to say that people or groups of individuals need something small that they can look at and that they can then address.
What that means for Americans is that the nuclear military is primarily the nuclear Navy . . . One can go to those individual bases and ascertain that the nuclear Navy is telling lies. That is the level of credibility or incredibility at which citizens can become involved . . .
I take it that Bremerton is part of a larger study to look at naval bases across the country and around the world.
(Buske discussed his sampling activities at U.S. naval bases, Vladivostok in Russia and a U.S. underground test site in the Aleutian Islands.) Yes. Bremerton is our focus. Bremerton is the site of interest at the present time. We think the Navy is the primary interest relative to the nuclear military . . .
You see, what they do at Bremerton, it's the only place where they decommission old nuclear ships. Which I really agree with. It's excellent . . . My argument is, in fact, that they should expedite it and get the things off the high seas quicker. And take the nuclear weapons with them. My objection there is, are they being honest? Are they being credible? Are they being reasonably safe? Does it make sense? And ultimately that goes back to the whole nuclear Navy.
The Navy's argument has been that they do not have Iodine 131 there, so they couldn't have released it. But if you look in what's called the Blue Book, the annual monitoring report, it says that at these facilities they in fact would have it in tanks. So, there's some questions.
(Buske discussed how in 1994 he swam up to shore near PSNS and collected kelp and algae samples and presented Navy officials with a legal description of the base boundary, which he said he did not enter. The officials refused to read the description and told Buske he had entered a "restricted area.")
I swam in on a second time on (May) 22nd, (1994) and at that time they arrested me. And they confiscated the samples. (Buske described how his samples were confiscated and how the Coast Guard towed an inflatable boat into the "restricted area" and arrested the occupants for trespassing.)
On the 30th of September last year I swam in without a boat to see if I could collect samples. They arrested me and hauled me off to the Federal Building in Seattle. The case was heard on the 23 of May this year before Judge Dwyer. Judge Dwyer did, in my opinion, just a superb job with it and argued that the Navy had to operate within the law. What you have is a constitutional question versus national security. The military in the U.S. is normally allowed to operate to some degree outside (the legal description of their base boundaries.) And it does. It's used to being able to. That's why the Navy did not flinch out front . . . The Navy lawyers, as I understand it, thought they were going to win. My own lawyer wasn't so sure. We prevailed on that.
The day after, I swam in and replicated the studies that we were going to do before. And the Navy was very cooperative, they just said let us know what you are going to do beforehand and we worked everything out . . . That was civilized on May 24. What we hit upon was a bunch of Iodine 131 again. This time within the restricted area, suggesting that the Navy was the source of the Iodine 131. We knew that there was Iodine 131 from the hospitals discharging into sewer systems. How much of the Iodine 131 in Sinclair Inlet next to PSNS comes from medical radwaste and how much of it comes from the Navy? The Navy's argument is that it's all medical radwaste. (Laughs.) Well, fine. Why don't they allow me to do a little study to confirm it?
Is there any way to distinguish between the two?
Yeah. But you need to sample. When you collect samples from right next to the source, you will have really, really high values. What you do is you locate the source. You do that with a little follow up study.
So, on Thursday the 8th of June, I gave the Navy notice that I was going to sample on the 13th of June to identify the source of the Iodine 131. (Buske related how his notice also followed a June 4 radiological accident aboard the USS California at PSNS. The Navy insisted in its press release that no radwaste had escaped into Sinclair Inlet.) And I said, "Listen, I'm going to be in there on the 13th, if you guys did release anything into Sinclair Inlet (on June 4) now would be a real good time to admit it."
On Friday the 9th, the three star admiral of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Crystal City, Virginia called the commandant of the Coast Guard and said there was this little problem that had to be taken care of, namely with these uncivilized samplers. I don't know what words he used, but (the Coast Guard) saluted and said they would take care of the problem. On Monday the 12th of June, the Coast Guard drafted the regulations and an emergency was created (imposing a security zone around PSNS.)
On Monday at 5p.m., the emergency regulation that they had never needed at the height of the Cold War went into effect. I had given them a time frame where our sampling was to begin on Tuesday morning. The Coast Guard and the Navy met me at our launch site Tuesday morning, read me the riot act . . . and threatened me with a $25,000 fine and a few years in jail if I did this sampling. This suggested that they were not enthusiastic about me locating the source of the Iodine 131. (Laughs.) Well, (Iodine 131) has an eight day half-life, so that created a serious problem.
(With the assistance of the Government Accountability Project, Buske then requested that a federal judge in Washington, D.C. impose a temporary restraining order upon the Navy to allow sampling. The judge denied the request. The Navy then invited the EPA and the state of Washington to conduct "joint sampling" at selected sites at PSNS. Buske was not invited, but again collected samples from outside the restricted area, which again showed Iodine 131.)
We have asked under the Freedom of Information Act for the EPA and the state of Washington to provide the data that they got from inside. Everything has gone very quiet. (Laughs.) We hit Iodine 131 around the perimeter and it looks to us like they still did not get their Iodine 131 source shut off.
Lets go to Mururoa. You looked at Jacques Cousteau's data from 1987 and you later found plankton outside of the Mururoa exclusion zone was contaminated.
Yes, in 1990 that was my study. Cousteau hit Cesium 134 in 1987 and there were some other radionuclides . . . that were indicative of leakage from the underground test. We hit a huge amount of Iodine 131 in plankton . . . It's continuously leaking. The leakage that Cousteau was looking at, the Cesium 134, is probably (from) back up the boreholes. They also have some fissures. The (atoll) is pretty heavily fissured even without the French tests, so they probably have some leakage in those fissures also. In 1990 what we hoped to do was to see if we could track down some of the points of leakage where it entered the lagoon. But the French were unenthusiastic and tended to arrest us. (Laughs.)
What is your analysis of Greenpeace's strategy this time?
(In 1990), I put a laboratory that resembled what I had here at the base on board the Rainbow Warrior. So Greenpeace ventured into some science, hesitatingly, because of the way Greenpeace is, which tends to be fairly anti-technological. At any rate, Greenpeace hesitatingly went for some science in 1990, but they have actually been very unenthusiastic about pursuing the issues. Part of the reason is Greenpeace has been arguing or tolerating arguments that leakage or collapse of the atoll, will lead to significant contamination of the Pacific Ocean.
(Buske described how the effects of French testing are strictly local, and although radioactive plankton has been flushed out of the Mururoa lagoon, it is difficult to detect.)
Technically, it's unsound to argue that the Pacific Ocean might be conceivably contaminated to any measurable degree. The other problem with arguing that is it detracts from the real problem, which is proliferation. The cute thing about it is that the public saw (the issue as one of) proliferation. That's exactly what it is. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid to get in the way of (the tests.) Of course, (the French) shouldn't be taking these atolls and destroying them, which they are. Greenpeace is correct at the tactical level. The best thing to do is get in the way of the thing.
You've been fairly adept at generating media coverage. In 1990 you sent (former) Gov. Booth Gardner and (former Secretary of Energy) James Watkins mulberry jam made from Strontium 90-contaminated berries picked on the Hanford Reach.
Yes. That was probably the best thing I've ever done. (Laughs.) It was good jam. It was the only time I ever made jam, and I had just a little taste test. It was good. (Laughs.)
What was growing there were mulberries and they happened to be ripe at the time I was sampling. So it's obvious that I get these mulberries, right? And the government's position was that none of anything there has any impact on anyone, don't worry about it. One just sort of glares at that after a while. (Laughs.) OK? Once you get sufficiently tired of listening to the nonsense, one says what can we do to get these people's attention? The nice thing about the mulberries was that they were just a little radioactive. (Buske describes the state's efforts to confiscate a sample of highly-radioactive curly dock.) The mulberries were not so radioactive that they would actually pose a hazard, but they were symbolic . . . We were awfully careful with it. We sealed the bottles and labeled them heavily. I still have two of them. I understand one of them is in the Smithsonian, by the way.
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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1995 edition of the Washington Free
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