This 182.1 mBq/cm2 value was from a recent a study (here) of residual Cesium 137 contamination in southwestern Utah soil following the nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950's and 1960's by R. Blair Bentley, Oregon State University. Bentley writes in the abstract:

'According to estimates from the NCI and DOE, Washington County, Utah was one of the areas which received some of the highest levels of radioactive contamination from Nuclear Fallout....A study was conducted using soil samples from the Washington County area to determine if Cesium 137 still exists in the area in detectable amounts. 102 soil samples were collected and analyzed. Only one of the 102 soil samples did not have detectable amounts of Cesium contained within it. Several of the samples contained levels substantially higher than earlier estimates would have predicted. This leads us to conclude that doses to the public from the testing could also have been higher than earlier thought. The area immediately around the community of Enterprise Utah contained the highest contamination readings of the locations we researched. Iron County, Northeast of St George, also had surprisingly high readings considering that the studies we researched stated that Iron County's contamination density was estimated to be lower than most of the areas in Washington County.'

Bentley found that St. George, Utah, may have not received the highest level of fallout in Utah as most believe. Instead, Iron County, the county to the north, may have been worse hit.  He also believes that doses to the public from Nevada Test Site testing fallout also could have been higher than earlier thought based on government estimates.  Bentley found that current Cesium-137 levels are under EPA thresholds but that in the past - perhaps around the 1970s - levels of radioactive Cesium in (public) soils may have surpassed current EPA standards.  (That means that using our current EPA standards, soils, prior to nuclear decay and erosion, were once unsafe for human 'use'.)  The study didn't look at radioisotopes still detectable in Utah soils, such as Strontium-90, Cobalt-60, etc....and so what about the combined effects of all radioisotopes still lingering in Utah soils?  Is that sum total of lingering fallout below current EPA thresholds?  Did that sum total in recent decades exceed maximum public radiation standards?

The graduate study also proves there are still unknown hotspots - areas that received high amounts of fallout.  In some areas, the fallout-radioisotopes have since decayed to safe levels, but damage was done and downwinders are paying the price with their health.  In other areas, the fallout is still toxic but the dangers are still not known by the public.  The website of 'Downwinders United' describes 24 areas across America that were hardest hit by NTS fallout.   So, we should be asking not only if St. George is still 'hot,' but also if Myhometown, USA, is still radioactive!

Are radioactive soils being lofted to an extent that should worry us?  A 2003 scientific paper titled 'Resuspension: Decadal Monitoring Time Series of the Anthropogenic Radioactivity Deposition in Japan' in the Journal of Radiation Research documents the authors' quest to find out why, in the 1990s (and through the present), levels of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 in sampled Japanese soils weren't decreasing, as expected from their decay half-lives and decreasing fallout from the stratosphere.  They were flat-lining.   Meaning, something was adding Cs137 and Sr90 (and plutonium) to Japan's soils!  They found that this 'anthropogenic radioactivity' (meaning 'manmade' radioactivity) wasn't primarily coming from the stratosphere, nor the oceans, nor nuclear power plants.  They found it was coming from 'reservoirs' on the ground: '...resuspension is the major factor in radioactivity deposition...suspended soil dust (surface soil particles) is the source of anthropogenic radionuclides in ambient air.'  They deduced resuspension from 'large-scale meteorological dust events' (winds and storm activity) in arid areas of East Asia are lifting-up legacy nuclear fallout into the air, where, presumably, it would travel hundreds or thousands of miles .  They note 'Hence, resuspension (surface soil dust suspension) must be a universal process injecting detectable amounts of anthropogenic radioactivity into the ambient air.'

Although the study authors may be correct in general that 'health effects to the individual member....are insignificant at the current level found' from these resuspension processes, what about dust resuspension from nuclear test sites like Maralinga in Australia and the Nevada Test Site?  Certainly, plutonium dust from Area 13 of the NTS, an unremediated site from a notorious plutonium-239 dispersal experiment, is injecting plutonium into the U.S. air supply continuously!   Plutonium from the NTS gets regularly resuspended during high-winds and storm activity, and floats downwind to other states and even beyond the U.S. borders.  

Listen to the free 30-minute audio-documentary: The Dragon That Slew St. George (real audio stream) produced by Wayne Brittenden.

View a snap-shot of the soil-sampling Google map that we re-created from Bentley's study - The numbers next to each peg in the map below illustrates the amount of Becquerels per container; the container had a volume capacity of 600 milliLiters; each value needs to be multiplied by 100 to roughly estimate the levels of radiation in Becquerels per meter squared, a common measure of deposition density.   Multiply each Becquerel unit by 27 to convert to PicoCuries (or 2,700 to get pCi/m2).