[Vision2020] All plutonium production to go to INEEL

[Mark Solomon]

This just in from the NY Times. As if the Snake River aquifer didn't 
have enough radiation problems already.

Mark Solomon


June 27, 2005

U.S. Has Plans to Again Make Own Plutonium

  By WILLIAM J. BROAD


The Bush administration is planning the government's first production 
of plutonium 238 since the cold war, stirring debate over the risks 
and benefits of the deadly material. The substance, valued as a power 
source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer.

Federal officials say the program would produce a total of 330 pounds 
over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling site 
outside Idaho Falls some 100 miles to the west and upwind of Grand 
Teton National Park in Wyoming. Officials say the program could cost 
$1.5 billion and generate more than 50,000 drums of hazardous and 
radioactive waste.

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is 
intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any 
details. But in the past, it has powered espionage devices.

"The real reason we're starting production is for national security," 
Timothy A. Frazier, head of radioisotope power systems at the Energy 
Department, said in a recent interview.

He vigorously denied that any of the classified missions would 
involve nuclear arms, satellites or weapons in space.

The laboratory is a source of pride and employment for many residents 
in the Idaho Falls area. But the secrecy is adding to unease in 
Wyoming, where environmentalists are scrutinizing the production plan 
- made public late Friday - and considering whether to fight it.

They say the production effort is a potential threat to nearby 
ecosystems, including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National 
Park and the area around Jackson Hole, famous for its billionaires, 
celebrities and weekend cowboys, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

"It's completely wrapped in the flag," said Mary Woollen-Mitchell, 
executive director of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, a group based in 
Jackson Hole. "They absolutely won't let on" about the missions.

"People are starting to pay attention," she said of the production 
plan. "On the street, just picking up my kids at school, they're 
getting keyed up that something is in the works."

Plutonium 238 has no central role in nuclear arms. Instead, it is 
valued for its steady heat, which can be turned into electricity. 
Nuclear batteries made of it are best known for powering spacecraft 
that go where sunlight is too dim to energize solar cells. For 
instance, they now power the Cassini probe exploring Saturn and its 
moons.

Federal and private experts unconnected to the project said the new 
plutonium would probably power devices for conducting espionage on 
land and under the sea. Even if no formal plans now exist to use the 
plutonium in space for military purposes, these experts said that the 
material could be used by the military to power compact spy 
satellites that would be hard for adversaries to track, evade or 
destroy.

"It's going to be a tough world in the next one or two decades, and 
this may be needed," said a senior federal scientist who helps the 
military plan space missions and spoke on the condition of anonymity 
because of the possibility that he would contradict federal policies. 
"Technologically, it makes sense."

Early in the nuclear era, the government became fascinated by 
plutonium 238 and used it regularly to make nuclear batteries that 
worked for years or decades. Scores of them powered satellites, 
planetary probes and spy devices, at times with disastrous results.

In 1964, a rocket failure led to the destruction of a navigation 
satellite powered by plutonium 238, spreading radioactivity around 
the globe and starting a debate over the event's health effects.

In 1965, high in the Himalayas, an intelligence team caught in a 
blizzard lost a plutonium-powered device meant to spy on China. And 
in 1968, an errant weather satellite crashed into the Pacific, but 
federal teams managed to recover its plutonium battery intact from 
the Santa Barbara Channel, off California.

Such accidents cooled enthusiasm for the batteries. But federal 
agencies continued to use them for a more limited range of missions, 
including those involving deep-space probes and top-secret devices 
for tapping undersea cables.

In 1997, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 
prepared to launch its Cassini probe of Saturn, hundreds of 
protesters converged on its Florida spaceport, arguing that an 
accident could rupture the craft's nuclear batteries and condemn 
thousands of people to death by cancer.

Plutonium 238 is hundreds of times more radioactive than the kind of 
plutonium used in nuclear arms, plutonium 239. Medical experts agree 
that inhaling even a speck poses a serious risk of lung cancer.

But federal experts say that the newest versions of the nuclear 
batteries are made to withstand rupture into tiny particles and that 
the risk of human exposure is extraordinarily low.

Today, the United States makes no plutonium 238 and instead relies on 
aging stockpiles or imports from Russia. By agreement with the 
Russians, it cannot use the imported material - some 35 pounds since 
the end of the cold war - for military purposes.

With its domestic stockpile running low, Washington now wants to 
resume production. Though it last made plutonium 238 in the 1980's at 
the government's Savannah River plant in South Carolina, it now wants 
to move such work to the Idaho National Laboratory and consolidate 
all the nation's plutonium 238 activities there, including efforts 
now at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Oak Ridge 
National Laboratory in Tennessee.

By centralizing everything in Idaho, the Energy Department hopes to 
increase security and reduce the risks involved in transporting the 
radioactive material over highways.

Late Friday, the department posted a 500-page draft environmental 
impact statement on the plan at www.consolidationeis.doe.gov. The 
public has 60 days to respond.

Mr. Frazier said the department planned to weigh public reaction and 
complete the regulatory process by late this year, and to finish the 
plan early in 2006. The president would then submit it to Congress 
for approval, he said. The work requires no international assent.

The Idaho National Laboratory, founded in 1949 for atomic research, 
stretches across 890 square miles of southeastern Idaho. The Big Lost 
River wanders its length. The site is dotted with 450 buildings and 
52 reactors - more than at any other place - most of them shut down. 
It has long wrestled with polluted areas and recently sought to set 
new standards in environmental restoration.

New plutonium facilities there would take five years to build and 
cost about $250 million, Mr. Frazier said. The operations budget 
would run to some $40 million annually over 30 years, he said, for a 
total cost of nearly $1.5 billion.

An existing reactor there would make the plutonium. Mr. Frazier said 
the goal was to start production by 2012 and have the first plutonium 
available by 2013. When possible, Mr. Frazier said, the plutonium 
would be used not only for national security but also for deep-space 
missions, reducing dependence on Russian supplies.

Since late last year, the Energy Department has tried to reassure 
citizens living around the proposed manufacturing site of the plan's 
necessity and safety.

But political activists in Wyoming have expressed frustration at what 
they call bureaucratic evasiveness regarding serious matters. "It's 
the nastiest of the nasty," Ms. Woollen-Mitchell said of plutonium 
238.

Early this year, she succeeded in learning some preliminary details 
of the plan from the Energy Department. Mr. Frazier provided her with 
a document that showed that production over 30 years would produce 
51,590 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

He also referred to the continuing drain on the government's national 
security stockpile, saying the known missions by the end of this 
decade would require 55 pounds of plutonium for 10 to 15 power 
systems. Those uses, he said, would leave virtually no plutonium for 
future classified missions.

Ms. Woollen-Mitchell was unswayed. In January she told the Energy 
Department that so much information about the plan remained hidden 
that it had "given us serious pause."

The Energy Department is courting Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free 
because it has flexed its political muscle before. Starting in late 
1999, financed by wealthy Jackson Hole residents like Harrison Ford, 
it fought to stop the Idaho lab from burning plutonium-contaminated 
waste in an incinerator and forced the lab to investigate 
alternatives.

In the recent interview, Mr. Frazier said he planned to talk to the 
group on Tuesday and expressed hope of winning people over.

"I don't know that I'll be able to make them perfectly comfortable," 
he said, "but they know that the department is willing to listen and 
talk and take their comments into consideration."

"We have a good case," Mr. Frazier added, saying the department could 
show that the Idaho plan "can be done safely with very minimal 
environmental impacts."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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