Article reporting findings from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) conducted on a sample of lakes in the Northeastern United States from 1991 to 1996.

Amchitka Island, Alaska, was at one time an integral player in the nation's defense program. Located in the North Pacific Ocean in the Aleutian Island archipelago, the island was intermittently inhabited by several key government agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor agency to the U.S. Department of Energy), and the U.S. Navy. Since 1993, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has conducted extensive investigations on Amchitka to determine the nature and extent of contamination resulting from historic nuclear testing. The uninhabited island was the site of three high-yield nuclear tests from 1965 to 1971. These test locations are now part of the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Operations Office's Environmental Management Program. In the summer of 2001, the DOE launched a large-scale remediation effort on Amchitka to perform agreed-upon corrective actions to the surface of the island. Due to the lack of resources available on Amchitka and logistical difficulties with conducting work at such a remote location, the DOE partnered with the Navy and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to share certain specified costs and resources. Attempting to negotiate the partnerships while organizing and implementing the surface remediation on Amchitka proved to be …

Remote sensing images provide useful physical information, revealing such features as geological structure, vegetation, drainage patterns, and variations in consolidated and unconsolidated lithologies. That technology has been applied to the failed Sierra Blanca (Faskin Ranch) shallow burial low-level radioactive waste disposal site selected by the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority. It has been re-examined using data from LANDSAT satellite series. The comparison of the earlier LANDSAT V (5/20/86) (30-m resolution) with the later new, higher resolution ETM imagery (10/23/99) LANDSAT VII data (15-m resolution) clearly shows the superiority of the LANDSAT VII data. The search for surficial indications of evidence of fatal flaws at the Sierra Blanca site utilizing was not successful, as it had been in the case of the earlier remote sensing analysis of the failed Fort Hancock site utilizing LANDSAT V data. The authors conclude that the tectonic activity at the Sierra Blanca site is much less recent and active than in the previously studied Fort Hancock site. The Sierra Blanca site failed primarily on the further needed documentation concerning a subsurface fault underneath the site and environmental justice issues. The presence of this fault was not revealed using the newer LANDSAT VII data. Despite this …