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A scientific expedition to a remote Aleutian island led by a University of Pittsburgh researcher has found no signs of radioactive waste seeping from the largest underground nuclear explosion in the nation's history.

Sooner or later, radioactive particles will begin to leak from Amchitka Island, but right now, the plants, fish, birds and marine mammals in the surrounding waters of the Bering Sea show no signs of contamination, said project director Conrad "Dan" Volz, head of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health.

"This is good news," said Volz. "But obviously there could be a breakthrough at some point, so a long-term monitoring plan must be put in place."

The methods used at Amchitka also could provide a model to study other bomb testing sites and even to evaluate areas in Western Pennsylvania that house waste from the iron, steel and nuclear industries, he said. Last month, Volz traveled to Lithuania to speak to NATO officials about preventing catastrophes at old nuclear installations in the former Soviet Union.

"We really have developed an interdisciplinary methodology that could be used to solve a wide variety of problems," Volz said, whose efforts to assess the island's nuclear legacy were profiled last year in the Tribune-Review.

Volz and a team of scientists working through an independent partnership of university researchers called the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation spent about two months on and around Amchitka last summer. CRESP helps the federal government make decisions about cleaning up the nation's nuclear weapons sites.

A $3.1 million field expedition last summer was paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is moving to designate the outpost as a national wildlife refuge under the stewardship of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Located 1,340 miles southwest of Anchorage, the uninhabited island was the site of three underground nuclear tests conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission from 1965 to 1971. The last explosion was a 5-megaton bomb detonated a mile beneath the earth.

The thermonuclear blast was almost 400 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. It lifted Amchitka one foot in the air and sent waves two stories high crashing on its rugged cliffs.

Until Volz and his colleagues embarked on their study, it was unclear whether radioactive particles released underground by the nuclear tests were leaking into the ocean from a crater created by the bomb that is supposed to contain radioactive debris.

Cancer-causing nuclear waste in the waters around Amchitka could have serious consequences for marine life and the Alaskan fisheries industry, native Aleutian hunters and seafood consumers worldwide.

To test for seepage, Volz and other CRESP scientists collected biological samples from nearly 30 species -- from sea urchins to giant octopuses -- and obtained geophysical samples from ocean sediments.

After a year of analysis, a 1,300-page report released last month revealed that levels of radioactivity found at Amchitka were similar to those found at another spot in the Aleutians and to noncontaminated places in the northern hemisphere.

The CRESP data will serve as a baseline to help scientists recognize when the dangerous nuclear residue begins to emerge, whether it happens hundreds of years from now or sooner, Volz said.

"The findings should provide assurance to both those who depend on the island's marine environment for subsistence food and for the significant commercial fishing interests of the region," said the project's principal investigator, Charles Powers, in a statement.

Powers is a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

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