Test Site could house bomb ‘pit’ plant

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002 | 9:17 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Nevada Test Site likely ranks at No. 2 or No. 3 on a list of five sites proposed for the nation's new nuclear bomb "pit" plant, several watchdog activists said Tuesday.

The Energy Department's Savannah River site in South Carolina is probably the department's top choice, said Tom Clements, a Greenpeace spokesman and director of the Nuclear Control Institute. The Test Site, however is a strong No. 2 candidate, he said.

"It certainly meets the remoteness criteria," Clements said, speaking after a Tuesday hearing at Energy Department headquarters in Washington.

Don Hancock, director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, agreed that the Savannah River site and the Test Site were likely the No. 1 and No. 2 choices respectively for the department.

The Energy Department is in the middle of public hearings on whether -- and where -- to construct the new plant; a Las Vegas hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday at the Energy Department office at 232 Energy Way.

Energy Department officials last month announced they had chosen five sites as candidates for the new pit factory: the Test Site; Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas; the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.; and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M.

The department plans to choose one site by April 2004.

Department officials insist there is no front-runner. "All the sites are equal," Michael Mitchell, Energy Department director of the new plant proposal, said.

But Hancock said flatly, "That's not true. The Department of Energy just doesn't want to have this discussion yet."

Hancock, who did not attend the Washington meeting but closely monitors the pit plant proposal, is among the activists clamoring for the department to release the "screening analysis" it used to develop the list of five sites.

Pits are softball-sized spheres that act as a trigger in a nuclear weapon. Pits were produced at the Energy Department's Rocky Flats plant in Colorado from 1952 to 1989, when the badly contaminated facility was closed for cleanup. That left the United States as the only nuclear nation without a full-time pit plant.

The Los Alamos site can produce about 20 pits a year, officials at Tuesday's briefing said. But the new plant could produce 125 pits per year.

The new plant is needed because plutonium pits decay over time, although it's not clear when the pits would be critically decayed. The new plant could open by 2018 and be in full production by 2020, at a cost of $2 billion to $4 billion.

Department officials say the new pit plant is vital to the integrity of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. President Bush supports a new plant. There has been a clear "recognition of need" for a new plant, the Energy Department's Mitchell said.

But activists say the department has not made a case for constructing a costly new plant.

Three activists on Tuesday estimated the department has at least 25,000 pits -- including roughly 10,000 mounted on warheads -- with the balance in reserve at the Pantex site. The actual numbers are classified, department officials say.

"That's a lot of pits," said Jim Bridgman, program director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.

The department has not proved it needs new pits to replace decaying old ones, activists said. The issue of aging pits is a "boogeyman," Bridgman said. He said it was ironic that so many U.S. workers and the environment suffered so much at Rocky Flats in the name of protecting the nation.

"Now as we consider a new facility, we have to ask ourselves, does the threat warrant subjecting our people and environment with additional suffering and damage?" Bridgman said.

Energy Department officials say they have learned many lessons from Rocky Flats and have new plans to avoid contaminating a new facility. The new plant will be designed based on a "gets it right" approach that balances production, safety, security and protecting the environment, department officials said.

Most Nevada officials have not taken a clear stance on the prospect of locating the new plant in the state; only Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has opposed it. Nevada lawmakers generally support the Test Site's historic role in protecting national security, but fear the environmental disasters that unfolded at Rocky Flats.

Political pressure is likely to be a factor in the final decision. At a hearing last week in Carlsbad it became clear that many locals there want the plant and the roughly 1,500 jobs in New Mexico. Of 46 speakers, only two argued against the plant, Mitchell said. A crowd of roughly 85 people in Texas seemed more split about the plant being built at Pantex, he said.