Test synopsis : The destruction of BORAX-I caused the " aerial distribution of contaminants resulting from the final experiment of the BORAX-I reactor " and the likely contamination of the topmost 1 foot of soil over about 2 acres in the vicinity . The site needed to be cleaned up prior to being used for subsequent experiments . The 84,000-square foot ( 7,800 m2 ) area was covered with 6 inches of gravel in 1954 , but grass , sagebrush , and other plants reseeded the area since then . The BORAX-I burial ground is located about northwest of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 , a publicly accessible national monument . Since 1987 , the United States Environmental Protection Agency has classified the burial ground as Superfund site Operable Unit 6-01 , one of two such sites ( along with SL-1 ) at the Idaho National Laboratory . In 1995 , the EPA ordered the primary remedy of the burial ground should be : " Containment by capping with an engineered barrier constructed primarily of native materials . " The site is expected to produce no more than a 2 in 10,000 increase in cancer risk for long term residential use after 320 years , with no significant decrease after that time . This risk calculation ignores the shielding provided by the soil cover , which at the time of the EPA decision had reduced exposure to little more than background level , and makes very pessimistic modeling assumptions that greatly increase the projected risk , to deliberately focus on the high rather than low effect side
SL-1
SL-1
BORAX experiments