DOE may move Los Alamos operation to Test Site

Wednesday, May 24, 2000 | 12:33 p.m.

The Nevada Test Site is one of four places being considered by the Department of Energy for a center to train people how to handle nuclear materials safely and learn how to detect nuclear weapons.

DOE officials offered the public on Tuesday night the first look at a plan to remove 30- to 50-year-old facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The possible new locations are the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, another site in Los Alamos, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico or Argonne National Laboratory West in Idaho.

If the DOE moves Technical Area 18 from Los Alamos, it will cost at least $100 million for construction, transportation of two tons of radioactive materials and security, said Jay Rose, DOE's environmental impacts manager for the project.

And that's cheap, compared to hundreds of millions of dollars needed if the facility was rebuilt on its current spot, he said. DOE hopes to make a move by 2004.

At least 80 technical experts would be affected by the move to the Test Site, Rose said.

Although the DOE prefers to move its technical assistance operations about three miles away from the current Los Alamos site, the Test Site offers the nearly new $100 million Device Assembly Facility, also known as DAF.

Completed in 1998, DAF's sophisticated laboratory was designed to house nuclear weapons for assembly before they were blown up at the Test Site, DOE spokesman Derek Scammell said.

DAF was planned during the early 1980s when the United States was at the height of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.

DAF was built in response to an NTS manager's pleas that assembling bombs was done in an area "that was not too safe," Scammell said. Scientists use it today to assemble high explosive experiments known as subcriticals, blasts that do not sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

DAF would need between $80 million and $90 million to refinish walls to handle the radioactive materials used in laboratory experiments, shielding to protect workers and control rooms.

One difficulty with the Test Site alternative, Rose said, is some of the nuclear materials that need to be moved do not have licensed containers to ship them to the Test Site, he said. If the operation stays at Los Alamos, the DOE does not need licensed shipping containers.

"Obviously we won't and we can't move the material until we have a license for the containers from the U.S. Department of Transportation," Rose said.

Long before the fire swept through the forests around Los Alamos earlier this month, the DOE had begun to hunt for a safer and more secure facility, Rose said. The current technical area was not burned.

"I guess forest fires will be considered and the erosion that follows afterward when the rains come in New Mexico," he said of further development at the site.

Once a draft report of the environmental impacts from the project is issued for all four sites, about August or September, Rose said, the DOE will schedule public hearings this fall in Las Vegas and at the other sites. A final decision on where to put the facility is expected in January 2001.