The great divider

Plutonium project pits INL against nuclear watchdogs

By NICOLE STRICKER
nstricker@postregister.com

Idaho National Laboratory may soon turn a corner that leads to either a bright, shiny future or a dark, menacing alley, depending on whom you ask.

The federal government wants to consolidate the nation's nuclear-battery production at its Idaho lab. The move would double Idaho's role in the process and bring the dirtiest steps here, which has triggered an outcry attracting national media attention.

Newspapers throughout the nation have reported on a plan to base plutonium-battery work in Idaho. Plutonium batteries have powered NASA's deep-space probes for more than 35 years and can run spying devices used for national security.

Higher security demands since Sept. 11, 2001, prompted the government to review its plutonium-battery program and make some changes.

After being asked to ramp up production, the Department of Energy looked for the most safe, secure and cost-effective method. Because three of six steps in the process already involve INL, it says Idaho is a logical base of operations.

The DOE announced its preference last month. And that's when the wrangling began.

On one side are individual and group watchdogs such as Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free that say the project will threaten the region with a Chernobyl-scale nuclear accident or widespread plutonium poisoning.

Such groups have mobilized for a fight on the scale of their successful 2000 effort to thwart building a nuclear-waste incinerator in Idaho. The Snake River Alliance aims to raise $70,000 to fight the project, urges its members to write letters to newspapers and even suggests talking points. Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free ran a full-page advertisement in the Jackson Hole Daily peppered with red ink, exclamation points and loaded language.

On the other side is the DOE.

The agency's draft Environmental Impact Statement outlines the costs and benefits of basing the project in Idaho, and DOE officials have spoken publicly on its contents since June. The statement and officials paint a picture of sound reasoning while insisting the project presents no risks whatsoever and that it will only benefit INL, Idaho residents and the nation.

In the middle is INL and its contractor, Battelle Energy Alliance.

The contractor has little choice in what missions the DOE assigns, but it has strived to defend the lab's assets and safety record in the face of bashing from opponents of the project. Official responses issued by the DOE have been slow coming -- the result of both government bureaucracy and that the agency is collecting public comments, not waging a war of words.

Those on the sidelines -- including many INL workers and most Idaho Falls residents -- likely feel a little lost. The inch-thick impact statement and its 70-page summary are filled with staid descriptions and tables of hard data. Public discourse tends toward either unlikely doomsday scenarios aimed at stoking fear or space images and reassurances to inspire security, hope and pride.

That scene will come home Monday at DOE's public meeting in Idaho Falls, the fifth of eight meetings throughout the state and nation geared toward gathering public comment. Both sides' arguments are outlined below.

The proposal

Nuclear batteries run on plutonium-238, not the weapons-grade 239 isotope. The battery fuel is more radioactive than the bomb material -- meaning it degrades faster and gives off enough heat to power batteries for decades. But all that radioactivity makes it especially harmful if it's inhaled or gets inside a cut. Skin blocks the radiation.

When the DOE resumes making plutonium-238 (which stopped in the late '80s with the shutdown of its production reactor), it can either use existing infrastructure or build a new facility. Because the current system requires more security and trucking plutonium between national labs in Idaho, Tennessee and New Mexico, the DOE favors building new facilities in Idaho and basing the entire process here.

INL already is home to the starting material, called neptunium-237. The DOE decided in August 2004 to move the material here because security was better. Under the system in place now, the raw material would go to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to be made into target rods. Then it would come back to INL to get blasted with neutrons and converted to plutonium-238 in the lab's Advanced Test Reactor, the only operating DOE reactor that can handle the job.

After irradiation, the rods would return to Tennessee, where they'd be disassembled and prepared for purification. The raw plutonium-238 would then go to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to be purified and encased in iridium, a strong, heat-resistant metal.

The encased plutonium comes back to INL, where the DOE moved the battery-building facility in July 2002. The batteries convert the plutonium's heat to electricity and protect the radioactive pellet from crash landings or other accidents.

The cost of improving security at all three sites is driving the DOE's proposal to nix the 8,000 miles of highway transport and base the entire plutonium-battery project at INL -- the most remote and easiest to secure of the three labs. The proposal would require building facilities at INL's Materials and Fuels Complex (the former Argonne National Laboratory-West) to make targets, process the plutonium-238 and encase it into fuel pellets.

The DOE plans to make about 11 pounds of plutonium-238 per year for the next 35 years. A full-size battery such as the one in NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn uses nearly 18 pounds of plutonium.

Is plutonium-238 really needed for nuclear batteries?

DOE says yes: Space and spy missions rely on these batteries for heat and fuel in remote climates. Solar panels aren't versatile enough -- in deep space they would have to be too large to be practical, and they don't work on the dark side of planets.

In 1992, the DOE started making space batteries from a Russian stockpile of plutonium-238. But that supply can't be used for national security missions.

In January 2001, the DOE decided to restart its plutonium program using INL's ATR and the Tennessee and New Mexico facilities. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the department reconsidered where the plutonium should be made, but not whether to make it. In fact, the attacks increased the need for national security nuclear batteries, the DOE has said.

Watchdogs say no: Because the national security missions are classified, the DOE can't say how those batteries will be used. Watchdogs say such information is crucial to weighing environmental, financial and social risks of making the batteries. It's unfair to ask Idahoans to bear the risk of making plutonium without being able to weigh the benefits, a publication from the Snake River Alliance says.

Did the DOE consider other options?

Watchdogs say no: The DOE has been determined to move the plutonium project to INL for years, says Tom Patricelli, president of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free. Los Alamos would be a better choice because it already houses many plutonium-238 facilities, he said in a news release. The DOE should build a new state-of-the-art reactor there for the project, he said.

Peter Rickards, a Twin Falls podiatrist and frequent challenger of the DOE's safety claims, favors the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site previously made plutonium-238, and in the case of a major terrorist attack, airborne plutonium would blow out to sea rather than over major U.S. cities, he said.

The DOE says yes: In its draft environmental impact statement, the DOE considered four other sites for the plutonium project. Los Alamos was dismissed because it doesn't have a nuclear reactor. The Hanford and Savannah River sites were eliminated because their reactors are no longer operating and cannot be restarted. Oak Ridge was ruled out because its reactor can't make all the plutonium the DOE needs.

The DOE dismissed the idea of building a new nuclear reactor because it would be too expensive. It would cost about $1 billion for the reactor alone, compared to less than $300 million to relocate the entire process to INL, said Tim Frazier, head of the DOE's nuclear battery program.

Is the ATR up to the job?

Watchdogs say no: The 40-year-old reactor is riddled with design flaws, has a history of accidents ("SCRAMS") and sits in a seismic zone rivaling San Francisco, Patricelli said.

"This reactor does not even meet the licensing requirements of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a commercial reactor," he said.

A major accident at the ATR could release nearly twice the radiation seen at Chernobyl, the DOE has documented.

A 2003 inspection by the U.S. Office of Independent Oversight and Performance Assurance found weaknesses in the safety system designed for major accidents.

The DOE says yes: Since its inception in 1967, the ATR has never had a nuclear accident, the Battelle Energy Alliance said in a fact sheet. The reactor is designed to shut itself down (or SCRAM) whenever it detects irregularities, and it does so several times a year in response to power outages, said John Dwight, director of ATR programs. Operators also intentionally SCRAM ATR to shut it down for maintenance.

The reactor was built 38 years ago, but its internal core structures are brand new and are replaced every eight to 10 years. Other systems controlling the ATR also are continually upgraded and maintained, Dwight said. The problems identified in the independent report, which INL commissioned, have been fixed, he said.

Although the reactor facility was designed to withstand a seismic zone rivaling San Francisco, its home in the Snake River Plain is actually relatively calm compared to the surrounding mountains, the fact sheet said. During a large 1983 earthquake at Borah Peak between Mackay and Challis, the reactor performed as designed and shut itself down.

Unlike commercial power reactors, the ATR doesn't require or justify a containment dome because it contains a fraction (one-sixtieth) of the radioactive material and operates at vastly lower temperatures and pressures.

The Chernobyl-scale release Patricelli refers to would require the simultaneous failure of multiple worker and automatic safeguards, said Ray Furstenau, DOE-Idaho's assistant manager for research and development. Such an accident might happen once in a million years, the fact sheet said. In the extraordinarily unlikely event of a meltdown, any plutonium rods inside the reactor would melt, not explode into the air, Furstenau said.

Will the health of INL workers be protected?

Watchdogs say no: People can get cancer from inhaling even a single dust particle of plutonium-238. A 2003 accident at the Los Alamos facility exposed two workers. An oversight board said the DOE failed to balance the mission goals with worker safety, essentially valuing plutonium more than people, the Snake River Alliance's citizen report said. The DOE can't be trusted to protect Idaho employees, especially since it intends to model the Idaho project on past procedures, opponents say.

The DOE says yes: The two Los Alamos workers were treated immediately (people can take a drug that sops up plutonium) and have had no ill health effects, said Fran Williams, director of Environmental Safety and Quality for INL.

Williams worked for years at Savannah River when it was producing plutonium-238 and still figuring out the best way to protect workers. Several workers were exposed in the late '70s and early '80s, inhaling plutonium-238 or getting it in their bloodstream, she said. Yet after 25 years, none of those workers has had ill health effects from the exposure, Williams said.

She said that if the project comes to INL, her team hopes to find ways to use larger plutonium particles, which would be safer for workers in the case of an accident. Moving the work here also would allow the DOE to design buildings and work areas that are safer than those at previous sites, where existing structures were modified for plutonium-238 work, Frazier said.

Will the environment be protected?

The DOE says yes: The impact statement said the project will generate very little waste, all of which will leave Idaho. Low-level radioactive waste representing less than 3 percent of what's produced annually at INL will be shipped to Nevada or a commercial waste repository, the statement said.

The biggest impact for INL will be 200 drums of transuranic waste generated each year -- double what the lab makes now. The DOE intends to send that waste to New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, but hasn't yet received approval to do so. The plant already accepts waste from INL and from the Los Alamos plutonium-238 facility. But INL can't get approval for the new waste until the DOE decides whether to base the plutonium work there, DOE-Idaho spokesman Brad Bugger said.

Watchdogs say no: The DOE has done a poor job of explaining how the waste will be treated and where it will go. The Snake River Alliance, Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free and Kathleen Trever, who oversees INL for the state of Idaho, don't want to see INL's cleanup efforts compromised by the project.

Basing the project here also could pave the way for future dirty work, the Snake River Alliance said. True to its name, Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free worries about a major accident blowing plutonium across the state.

"If this project goes forward, our lives, lands and national treasures will be exposed to enormous risks of radiation poisoning and contamination," according to a KYNF flier.

Does the DOE have a valid defense mission?

The DOE says yes: New Mexico's waste plant only accepts materials generated from defense-related projects. Also, if the DOE decides to ask for independent oversight from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, it will need to show that the project is somehow defense-related.

Although the ATR will make most of the plutonium-238, some will be recovered from dismantled weapons. Since the 1960s, nuclear weapons have contained plutonium batteries that produce tiny amounts of heat and electricity. Also, the neptunium targets themselves arose from a weapons-related project, Bugger said.

Some of the national security applications could be considered defense-related, he said.

Watchdogs say no: This is the angle that worries opponents, who fear the batteries will be used in space- and land-based weapons.

The DOE has explicitly said the batteries will not be used in weapons (nuclear or non-nuclear), military satellites or any missile defense systems. But it also has said the national security mission could change at any time, wrote Snake River Alliance's Beatrice Brailsford in a Post Register editorial. Because the end-use of batteries slated for national security is classified and will remain secret, there's no way to know whether they might one day be used in weapons.

Science and Medicine reporter Nicole Stricker can be reached at 542-6763.

If you go

The Department of Energy will host several public meetings to hear comments about its proposal to consolidate plutonium battery production at the Idaho National Lab.

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Where: Shilo Inn, 780 Lindsay Blvd., Idaho Falls

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Fort Hall Tribal Business Center, Interstate 15, Exit 80, Fort Hall

Learn more

Copies of the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the plan to consolidate plutonium battery production are available at the Idaho Falls Public Library (457 Broadway), the DOE public reading room (1776 Science Center Drive) and online at http://consolidationeis.doe.gov under "publications."

Get involved

Submit comments using any of the following methods.

Phone: 1-800-919-3706

Fax: 1-800-919-3765

E-mail: consolidationeis@nuclear .energy.gov

U.S. mail: Timothy Frazier, document manager; U.S. Department of Energy; NE-50/GTN Building; 1000 Independence Avenue, S.W.; Washington, DC 20585-1290

Tentative timeline

The decision process and anticipated timeline:

Now: The DOE will take suggestions about its Environmental Impact Statement through Aug. 29.

Fall: All comments will be considered in the final impact statement prepared by DOE.

November: The final impact statement will be made publicly available, and Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman will consider the alternatives outlined.

December: Bodman will choose one of the alternatives and sign a Record of Decision that dictates where to base plutonium battery production.

For more information on these and other stories see today'edition of the Post Register or subscribe online.

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