Texas senator touts facility for new plutonium pit plant

Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003 | 11:19 a.m.

The Pantex nuclear facility in Amarillo, Texas, would be the ideal choice for a new site to develop plutonium pits that provide trigger material for nuclear bombs, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said Wednesday.

Several facilities are vying to become home for the Department of Energy's proposed Modern Pit Facility, which would process, manufacture and assemble plutonium pits for use at Pantex.

Pantex is the nation's primary assembly and disassembly plant for nuclear warheads and currently repackages old plutonium pits to meet new safety standards. Pantex stores more than 12,000 plutonium pits.

"Building the MPF at Pantex would eliminate the need to transport the plutonium pits, increasing safety, and reducing environmental concerns," Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a news release. "Pantex is the most cost-effective site in the nuclear weapons program, and every operation is designed to protect human health and safety, the environment, and against the threat of theft or accidental exposure."

But some people who live nearby don't want Pantex to get the facility, which would create about 1,000 jobs.

"We do not need to build those (pits) in an area that is primarily agricultural, breadbasket to the world, and over a major aquifer," said Jeri Osborne, who lives near the plant and calls Cornyn's safety claims "hogwash."

"We've got problems with the Ogallala Aquifer already," she said, referring to contamination and depletion of the aquifer.

The environmental group Greenpeace also has opposed plans to build the pit facility.

But Cornyn, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces subcommittee and the Environment and the Public Works Committee's subcommittee responsible for nuclear safety, says safety is the key attraction for Pantex.

He met Tuesday with acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Linton S. Brooks, and wrote a letter outlining benefits of locating the MPF in the Panhandle.

The facility would begin initial operations in 2018, with full production slated for 2020.

It would have a production capacity of at least 125 pits annually and the ability to expand as needed.

Other possible sites are the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; Nevada Test Site; and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The United States' pit production operations were shut down in 1989 at the energy department's Rocky Flats facility near Denver in response to alleged violations of environmental statutes that were made after a raid by the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the EPA's Web site.

In 1992, when the Cold War ended, the U.S. decided not to resume production of nuclear weapons parts at Rocky Flats. No plutonium pits have been produced since then.

Los Alamos is developing an interim pit production facility that will begin making as many as 50 certified plutonium pits a year by 2007.

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On the Net:

www.pantex.com

http://www.epa.gov/region08/superfund/sites/co/rocky.html