Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, January 22, 2007 11:00 pm
The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS -- A federal judge has pushed forward by one day a scheduled hearing on a proposed non-nuclear explosion that authorities say would send a mushroom-shaped dust cloud high over the Nevada desert.
U.S. District Court Judge Lloyd George in Las Vegas cited a scheduling conflict in moving the date of the telephone conference call hearing from Feb. 1 to Jan. 31.
A Justice Department lawyer in Washington, D.C., representing the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency is due to provide an update on the proposal to detonate a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site, about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas. No date has been set for the blast.
Government officials have called the test explosion in Nevada important for gathering data about penetrating hardened and deeply buried targets.
Critics have called the test a surrogate for a low-yield nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb, and expressed fears that it would scatter dust contaminated by 928 atmospheric and below-ground nuclear weapons tests at the test site from 1951 to 1992.
The explosion was postponed last year after Western Shoshone tribe members and "downwinders" in Utah and Nevada filed suit, and Utah congressional representatives joined in questioning its safety.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D2.