PLUTONIUM DISTRIBUTION IN THE ENVIRONS OF THE NEVADA TEST SITE--STATUS REPORT W. A. Bliss and F. M. Jakubowski Environmental Monitoring and Support Laboratory, Las Vegas U.S. Environmental Protection Agency INTRODUCTION Subsequent to the October 1974 Information Meeting of the Nevada Applied Ecology Group (NAEG), EPA efforts for the NAEG distribution and inventory studies have been directed toward analyzing the backlog of soil and air samples collected under the program and collecting and analyzing special-study soil samples. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Plutonium in Soil Analytical results from the soil sample backlog have not shown any significant differences from data previously generated. Many of those results are undergoing in-house review and will be reported later in a more thorough fashion. The data generated from soil sampling to define the plutonium distribution around the NIS are again being reviewed to evaluate the associated errors. Analytical results from samples collected in an area northeast of the NTS, where concentrations up to 1.5 pCi/gm (91 nCi/m*) have been reported, have been evaluated. location. Twenty adjacent surface soil samples were collected from one Each sample was split and each split received two plutonium analyses. The procedures and results have been recorded, but not published (Church, 1973). The range of plutonium concentrations in these 80 analyses was 0.15 to 18 pCi/gm. These 80 results have been treated in numerous fashions; however, the logarithm of the data best fits a normal distribution. The computed log Mean was 1.05 pCi/gm with upper and lower 95% confidence limits of 14.5 and 0.077 pCi/gm, respectively. 227