The Desert Research Institute is proposing to expand its Southern Nevada Science Center in Las Vegas to accommodate its archaeological laboratories and to provide a centralized, publicly accessible location for the U.S. Department of Energy's archives documenting 50 years of Nevada Test Site history.
The proposed 48,000-square-foot addition to DRI's facility at 755 E. Flamingo Road would also include an exhibit program depicting the critical Cold War history of the test site and its impact on the growth of southern Nevada.
U.S. Senator Harry Reid's office has initiated discussions with the Smithsonian Institution with the hope of winning formal affiliation for the historical collection to be gathered within the new structure, according to Don Wilson, deputy manager for Reid's southern Nevada regional office. Affiliation with the Smithsonian could include loans of historical materials from the Washington, D.C. collection to the Las Vegas facility.
Funding for the $10.9 million project would come from $8.4 million in state revenue bonds to be retired by a 20-year lease with the U.S. government, and $2.5 million in requested state capital improvement appropriations. The Phase II project is part of a master plan for DRI's 11-acre Las Vegas campus approved by the University and Community College System Board of Regents in 1988.
The association of DRI with the U.S. Department of Energy allows DOE to better meet requirements under its Openness Initiative, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Archaeological Resource Protect Act and a Presidential Executive Order mandating that historical documents be made available and accessible to the public.
DRI President Stephen G. Wells said the addition will provide space for artifact curation and storage that meets federal legal requirements, as well as storage facilities and retrieval services for some 350,000 U.S. Department of Energy documents, films, photographs, artifacts, and materials related to radiation exposure and nuclear testing. Nuclear testing in the South Pacific and DOE activities elsewhere also account for some of the materials.
"In DRI's 30-year-plus research relationship with the Nevada Test Site, we've collected thousands of artifacts that must be interpreted, and the 10,000-square feet of new laboratory space in the expansion will accommodate these needs," Wells said.
The consolidation of DOE's archives at DRI is a mutually beneficial extension of our test site research activities. The record storage and retrieval area, space for long-term curation of artifacts, and the exhibits and visitors area would occupy the remaining 38,000 square feet. DRI has conducted environmental research on the test site since the 1960s.
State Senator Dina Titus, a UNLV political science professor who has been a longtime scholar and critic of U.S. nuclear testing policies administered by DOE, supports the consolidation of the test site archives in a central, easily accessible facility at DRI. She has introduced legislation to authorize the state to issue revenue bonds for the project and will support the institute's legislative efforts to obtain state funding.