No new date set for 'mushroom cloud' blast in Nevada desert

ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 2, 2006
LAS VEGAS (AP) - No new date was set Thursday for a proposed non-nuclear explosion that authorities have said would send a mushroom-shaped dust cloud high over the Nevada desert.
"At this point, there is no explosion authorized," Justice Department lawyer Carolyn Blanco in Washington, D.C., said during a conference call court hearing with U.S. District Judge Lloyd George in Las Vegas.
Blanco repeated an assurance she made during a hearing in October that the so-called "Divine Strake" test won't take place at least until next year.
The judge set another hearing for Feb. 1 after Blanco said she could not promise 60 days' notice before the blast would occur.
The federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency has called its plan to detonate a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site 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 contaminated material left from 928 atmospheric and below-ground nuclear weapons tests conducted at the vast Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1992.
The explosion, first scheduled June 2, was postponed indefinitely after Western Shoshone tribe members and "downwinders" in Utah and Nevada filed suit and Utah congressional representatives joined in questioning its safety.
The blast would involve 280 times more of the same material as the bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has said it would consider other locations and ways of conducting the experiment. No new plans were outlined Thursday.
Blanco said the agency was revising environmental studies that would be circulated for public comment before a new date was set.