Judge delays tests

Friday, May 30, 1997 | 11:44 a.m.

A federal judge has delayed U.S. Department of Energy plans to experiment with nuclear materials at the Nevada Test Site.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin in Washington, D.C., set June 10 to hear a preliminary injunction requested by the Natural Resources Defense Council and 28 other groups over the DOE's failure to complete two environmental studies.

But on Tuesday, the DOE asked for a delay in completing the studies. A hearing on that request has been set for June 17 in Washington, D.C., NRDC lead attorney Barbara Finamore said.

The subcritical experiments have been delayed until June 27 at the earliest. If the preliminary injunction is granted, the Test Site experiments and other plans DOE has for the U.S. nuclear stockpile stewardship won't be conducted until a thorough environmental study is completed.

The NRDC filed the original suit in 1989 and the DOE agreed to both an extensive environmental review of nuclear waste management and environmental restoration as well as the future of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

But neither study was completed. So the environmental group went back to court May 2.

Approved by O'Leary

The DOE planned to enter the world of shock physics with two subcritical experiments approved by former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary in 1995.

The experiments had been delayed for a year as the DOE conducted a Test Site-wide environmental impact statement that did not address the subcriticals.

DOE researchers went back to work 970 feet underneath the Nevada Test Site about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas after Energy Secretary Federico Pena announced in April the subcritical experiments for June and in the fall.

The experiments concern how nuclear materials react during explosions. In the tests, the nuclear material is prevented from going critical, or producing the chain reaction that results in a nuclear explosion.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory in Albuquerque has designed the first test, "Rebound," to study the properties of plutonium at extreme pressures. The designers dubbed the three blasts, Larry, Moe and Curly after the Three Stooges.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory then fashioned "Holog," to study ejected molten plutonium.

While Rebound promises three simultaneous blasts using about a pound of plutonium each, Holog's tests require the radioactive element at the size of a quarter -- no small change to researchers at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

"We have to know a lot more about explosions, to fill in the gaps for ensuring the nuclear stockpile," said David Schwoegler at Lawrence Livermore in Northern California.

While 934 experiments -- 100 of them above ground -- blasted nuclear materials into the rocks at the Test Site until a test ban in 1992, scientists never learned enough about how uranium and plutonium behave during those explosions, Schwoegler said.

Government researchers tried to substitute materials for the nuclear heart of such blasts, but results failed to define it for scientists.

The subcritical experiments are designed to fill in the blanks. As enough high explosives -- ranging from 81 pounds to the size of a road flare -- shock the plutonium in the sealed cavern, researchers will capture a 3-D snapshot of the explosion.

Underground protection

Some plutonium breaks away, prompting the need for the tests to go underground, Schwoegler said.

"There's a residue, even if there's no nuclear explosion," he said.

Critics charge that these experiments violate the spirit of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by President Clinton Sept. 24, 1996.

"That's our concern," NRDC's Finamore said. The NTS environmental impact statement did not consider whether these experiments were needed or not.

The DOE said the subcriticals repeat similar experiments conducted in the late 1950s during a testing moratorium with the former Soviet Union.

"We disagree strenuously," Finamore said. A programmatic environmental impact statement would explore that issue, she said.

There's nothing to guarantee that future experiments will not involve actual nuclear weapons or prototype warheads, charged Bruce Hall at Greenpeace's Nuclear Disarmament Campaign in Washington. Greenpeace joined the suit last month.

These experiments raise questions about U.S. compliance with the treaty, he said.

"We will make the already daunting task of verifying that treaty more difficult," Hall said. By allowing the U.S. to conduct subcriticals, the Russians or Chinese could justify conducting similar underground weapons tests at their sites in Novay Zemlya or Lop Nor.

Marylia Kelley of the Tri-Valley CARE group said an organized call-in has been scheduled to contact Pena on June 26 in an effort to stop the tests and further DOE activities.

"If our motion for a preliminary injunction is successful, they will not be able to conduct the subcriticals," she said. "They would need to do an entire review of the stockpile stewardship program."

The critics call for closing the Nevada Test Site and canceling these experiments.

An independent review panel known as JASON gave its approval for the two subcritical experiments.

In March a subcommittee of JASON chaired by physicist S. Drell concluded the subcriticals will add "valuable scientific information for understanding the properties of plutonium."

Limited testing

The scientists said there is no way the experiments might become a nuclear fireball. But they stopped short of endorsing future experiments.

"While the peer review process was adequate for these two tests, we are not satisfied that the process is adequate as a model for future experiments," they wrote in the summary.

Four more subcritical experiments are scheduled for next year: Icebound, Ash, Boomerang and Beech at a cost of $15 million to $25 million.

NRDC legal action has also delayed the $1.2 billion National Ignition Facility, where lasers may trigger laboratory-scale explosions. Preparations for that project began Tuesday, with Pena attending the Lawrence Livermore ceremony.