Factory at NTS could cause cancer

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, July 1, 2003 | 11:33 a.m.

The public hearing on placing a nuclear bomb trigger factory at the Nevada Test Site will be from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Room 201 of the Moyer Student Union Building.

The Test Site is among five sites in the nation under Energy Department consideration for the new plant, which would manufacture plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons.

A public meeting about the possible site for the factory will be conducted Wednesday night at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department arm that manages the Test Site, this summer is hosting field hearings near each of the five proposed sites.

Defense Department officials have said a new plant may be needed to manufacture new triggers for the aging weapons in the nation's nuclear stockpile. The facility also could make pits for new generations of nuclear weapons.

The Energy Department's plutonium pit plant at Rocky Flats, Colo., was closed in 1989 for massive environmental cleanup.

The proposal for a new plant is controversial. Critics say a plant is not necessary, that there is no evidence that the aging pits make the weapons unsafe or unreliable.

According to a new analysis of the Energy Department's draft environmental impact statement for the proposed plant by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the plant could expose workers to radiation at a rate that could cause one fatal cancer every four and a half years.

The exposure rates could vary according to proposed plant sizes, the analysis says. The largest of the proposed plants could cause up to nine deaths over the 40-year plant lifetime, IEER President Arjun Makhijani said.

IEER used the document's findings that the plant would produce a "collective dose estimate" of 560 millirem of radiation each year, Makhijani said.

"It seems unconscionable to propose to build such a risky and unneeded facility when the DOE is only just beginning to compensate workers that it put at risk during the Cold War after 50 years of denial of harm," Makhijani said.

Makhijani was referring to the Energy Department's historic admission in 2000 that Cold War nuclear weapons fabrication and testing at sites around the country had made workers ill and caused deaths, including at the Nevada Test Site.

The largest of the proposed plants could produce up to 450 pits per year.

"Building large numbers of new bombs that could be used in nuclear war-fighting seems to be the real purpose of this plant," Makhijani said.

An NNSA spokesman today scoffed at Makhijani's analysis.

"It's a complete misuse and distortion of statistics," NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said.

Wilkes said the analysis badly manipulates the risk data over the lifetime of the plant.

Wilkes noted that the individual radiation dose rate for a pit plant worker -- as opposed to the collective rates used by IEER -- would be scarcely higher than the amount of radiation that any given person receives in a year from natural radiation sources like the sun and X-rays.