1988
•Discovered 15 shoreline seeps that release radioactivity from Hanford into Columbia River. (See credit as “SEARCH”, R.E. Peterson and V.G. Johnson, “Riverbank Seepage of Groundwater Along the 100 Areas Shoreline, Hanford Site,” WHC-EP-0609, Westinghouse Hanford Company (1992), App. A.) That discovery led to closer study of contaminated Hanford groundwater seeping into river.

1989
•Invented a Constant-Photopeak-Width transformation for Sodium Iodide detectors. That development allows very wide-band, precision spectrometry.

1990
•Discovered strontium-90 seeping into the Columbia River, from near Hanford’s N-Reactor, at intolerably increasing rate. TRAC’s preparation of mulberry jam, slightly contaminated with strontium-90, received international attention and led to a pump-and-treat remediation program and the final closure of N-Reactor.

•Discovered cesium-134 leaking from France’s Mururoa test site into the South Pacific. That study was the focus of Greenpeace’s return to Mururoa after France sank the S/V Rainbow Warrior in 1985. International attention to that discovery and public protest led to the final closure of the Mururoa nuclear test site in 1995.

1996
•Discovered americium-241 seeping into the Bering Sea from the Cannikin explosion under Amchitka Island, Alaska. TRAC’s finding of that leakage, from the world’s largest underground nuclear explosion, prompted a worker compensation program and continuing environmental studies.

1998
•Discovered transuranic wastes from the SM-1A reactor at the old Ft. Greely, Alaska sewer outfall. That evidenced a clandestine micro-nuclear materials pilot program and inadequate reactor clean-up by the U.S. Army.

1999
•Identified K-Springs seepage into the Columbia River from the leaking KE basin, encouraging expedited removal of spent nuclear fuel from the holding basin, close to the river.

2000
•Discovered phosphorus-32 and strontium-90 being dumped from the Seversk facility, near Tomsk, Russia, into the River Tom. TRAC’s discovery of this world’s largest fresh-water nuclear contamination received international attention and prodded the Russian facility to diminish its dumping.

2001
•Found uranium-233 production wastes from Hanford contaminating the Columbia Riverbed. The Washington state Department of Ecology and TRAC are investigating that growing threat to wild salmon hatchlings, first to confirm, and then to develop remediation to save this important salmon stock.

2002
•Stabilized TRAC’s spectrometer by placing shielded, natural potassium-40 source under the pre-amp to improve low-level detection of radionuclides.

•Discovered Hanford reactor discharge vents in the riverbed at D-Island, calling attention to the need for Hanford clean-up to include the riverbed.

2003
•Discovered cesium-137 fallout from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, demonstrating the need for citizen-based monitoring of U.S. nuclear weapons facilities.

•First detection of cesium-137, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, seeping into the Rio Grande. This is an early warning of the emerging problem of wastes on the Laboratory’s site.

2004
•Monitored radioactive releases from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, for 5 months. This citizen-based monitoring initially identified previously undisclosed radioactive releases. Those releases stopped during the monitoring. This demonstrated the effectiveness of TRAC’s citizen-based monitoring of nuclear facilities.

•Invented a spring-auger riverbed water sampler. This tool minimizes the disturbance of coarse sediments before sampling riverbed water derived from the upper, contaminated sediments of Hanford Reach.