Powdered plutonium to hit the roads

Gannett News Service
May 16, 2002 20:10:00

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship an especially
deadly form of plutonium over the nation's highways this summer as part of
dismantling and cleaning the former Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory in
Colorado.


If lawsuits from the state of South Carolina and a California nuclear
watchdog group don't stop it, the Energy Department plans to truck tons of
powdered plutonium from Rocky Flats to the Savannah River Site in South
Carolina. Smaller amounts of the radioactive powder also would be shipped
from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to Savannah
River.

"Transportation of radioactive material in powdered form generally
should
be avoided," said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the
nuclear watchdog group Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in
Takoma Park, Md.

Although plutonium in any form is dangerous, the powder is more of a
problem: Wind or fire could spread it if shipment containers broke in an
accident or terrorist attack, he said. Immobilizing the powdered plutonium
by combining it with molten glass would be safer.

"There's a larger variety of accidents in which powder can be disbursed
because it's in an easily disbursable form," Makhijani said.

The routes these shipments would travel are classified because the
material still could be used to make nuclear weapons. But the powder
likely would pass through a dozen states.

The Energy Department converts plutonium scrap metal left over from the
bomb-making process into powder - using heat and pure oxygen in a
controlled environment - because scraps can spontaneously ignite.
Plutonium metal machined into bomb parts does not burst into flame.
Neither does raw plutonium originally shipped to the factories in the form
of metal "buttons." DOE officials won't say how much of the seven tons of
plutonium at Rocky Flats scheduled to go to South Carolina is powder, but
environmental groups estimate about half of it is.


Can cause cancer

A man-made material created when neutrons bombard uranium in a nuclear
reactor, plutonium is not highly radioactive. The radiation it gives off
is so weak that it cannot penetrate the skin. However, plutonium's
radioactivity lasts a long time. It has a half-life of 24,000 years. And
it becomes deadly when people breathe it or absorb it through cuts in the
skin. Then it causes lung and bone cancer.

"You don't want this stuff disbursed in an accident," said nuclear
physicist Frank Von Hippel, director of Princeton University's Science and
Global Security Program. "It would be much worse, radiologically, than a
spent (nuclear) fuel accident."

Powdered plutonium never would be released into the environment in an
accident, Energy Department officials say.

Before shipment, the material is encased in three very strong steel
containers filled with inert helium gas and welded shut. They say the
containers have passed fire and crush tests and are certified by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board.

"It has multiple layers of protection with certain security measures in
place," said DOE spokesman Joe Davis, who declined to elaborate on the
security.

Those who track classified Energy Department nuclear shipments say the
material travels in unmarked tractor-trailer rigs escorted by heavily
armed guards and tracked via satellite.

States are not notified when the shipments come through. That's in
contrast to DOE shipments of spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power
plants. In those cases, state public safety officials are notified 30 days
in advance so they can prepare. States provide police escorts for spent
fuel shipments when they go through urban areas and do periodic safety
inspections on the equipment.

The classified DOE shipments have none of those protections.

That does not particularly worry Western governors, said Ron Ross,
program
manager for environmental policy for the Western Governors' Association.

"It's of concern, but it's not alarming," he said. "Our (emergency)
folks
in the states and local communities are trained and know how to respond."


Making cross-country trip

The Southern States Energy Board, which coordinates nuclear waste
transportation planning among the 16 Southern states and the Energy
Department, is concerned about the larger issue of unnecessarily moving
nuclear waste.

The board supports South Carolina's lawsuit filed earlier this month
against the Energy Department, Executive Director Ken Nemeth said. The
suit seeks to get a firm commitment that plutonium brought into the
Savannah River Site from Rocky Flats eventually will be removed.


The Energy Department plans to turn some of the plutonium into a new
kind
of fuel for nuclear power plants at a facility to be built at Savannah
River. The agency has not yet said what it will do with about three tons
to five tons of plutonium now stored at Rocky Flats that is contaminated
with other materials and cannot be converted into reactor fuel.

Eventually, the plan is to move all this plutonium to the nation's
nuclear
waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. But it first must be converted
into a form not easily made into bombs.

"Why bring it in the first place?" Nemeth asked. "That stuff which
eventually is going to Yucca Mountain needs to go to Yucca Mountain. Why
ship it to the South and then ship it to the West. Why not leave it in the
West?"

Another lawsuit, filed in February by Tri-Valley Communities Against a
Radioactive Environment nuclear watchdog group in the San Francisco Bay
Area, asks the Energy Department to justify shipping machined plutonium
parts from Rocky Flats to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The lawsuit
alleges the agency plans to ship the pieces to Lawrence Livermore in a
container that failed to pass crush tests.

DOE's Joe Davis denies the agency has such plans and says it has only
discussed using the containers, which are larger than those used for
powdered plutonium.

At Lawrence Livermore, the parts would be heated in an oven, then the
pure
plutonium would be separated from partly contaminated pieces. The
contaminated pieces would be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in
New Mexico for permanent storage. The pure pieces would be converted to
powder and shipped to Savannah River.

Marylia Kelley, spokeswoman for Tri-Valley CAREs, said the plutonium
could
be broken down at Rocky Flats or at Savannah River.

Sending the material on a national tour only increases the risk of an
accident on the highways, she said.

"If you're managing a rock band, this strategy makes sense," Kelley
said.
"It's a strategy of maximum exposure. But when you're managing plutonium,
the strategy makes no sense."