Nuclear Weapon Plants Held to Need $80 Billion

The Energy Department has told the White House that it will cost the nation $80 billion over the next 21 years to modernize its aging nuclear weapons production establishment, relocate some facilities now considered too close to population centers and clean up chemical and radioactive wastes at existing facilities.

Of this sum, which would average about $4 billion annually through the year 2010, a total of a little more than $50 billion would be required to modernize the government-owned industrial plants that manufacture and assemble hundreds of specialized components for nuclear weapons, Administration sources said.

The sources said a continuing, three-year survey of environmental problems at weapons production and research facilities across the nation suggests that cleaning up a 45-year accumulation of chemical spills and low-level leaks of radioactivity will cost an additional $30 billion over the same period.

A classified report summarizing a multitude of modernization and restoration tasks facing the Department of Energy’s weapons production complex was sent last week to the White House, where it is under consideration by the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget, the sources said.

The aim of the proposed $80-billion program, the sources said, is twofold: to compensate for years of neglect over several administrations that allowed industrial facilities critical to maintaining the nation’s nuclear deterrent force to slip into disrepair and obsoles cence, and to put the complex of 17 major production sites on what one official called an “environmentally sound” footing.

The $80-billion figure, however, does not include additional billions of dollars that will be required to solidify and permanently dispose of millions of gallons of intensely radioactive “high level” military wastes now held in underground storage tanks at the government’s Hanford Reservation in Washington state and its Savannah River Plant in South Carolina.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the Energy Department report was to have been given to the House and Senate Armed Services committees Thursday but that it has been held up because of a dispute over cost projections between White House budget officials and the Energy Department.

Douglas Elmets, the department’s press secretary, declined to comment on the Post report. He noted that the recommendations are still classified and that they are being closely held until an unclassified summary is finished.

Closing of 2 Plants Urged

As part of the modernization plan, an Administration source said, the Energy Department recommends closing two controversy-plagued facilities at Fernald, Ohio, and near Denver that process radioactive materials. The plan also calls for moving plutonium-handling functions from a third facility at Pinellas, Fla., to a more remote but still unspecified location.

Research facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, which handle small amounts of plutonium, also would be moved, probably to one of the agency’s large defense sites in Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico or Washington state.

The Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald makes uranium fuel elements for production reactors that produce plutonium and tritium gas for weapons. Located 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati, the 35-year-old facility has become a focus of environmental protest and complaints from the state of Ohio over prolonged emissions of airborne uranium dust.

Contaminated Ground Water

At the Rocky Flats plant 21 miles northwest of Denver, several fires and lax waste disposal practices since the 1950s have contaminated ground water beneath the site with toxic chemicals and have deposited traces of radioactive plutonium in soil. Rocky Flats manufactures the finely machined metallic plutonium cores of nuclear weapons.

The Energy Department contends that in both cases radioactive releases are below levels likely to cause measurable health effects. In both cases, however, officials note that suburban development has crept steadily closer in the more than 30 years since the plants were built. At the same time, the nation’s standards of acceptable risk have grown much more stringent.

The Energy Department already has proposed spending more than $1 billion on a new plutonium purification facility at its Idaho National Engineering Laboratory that would abandon inherently leak-prone chemical processes in favor of a much more efficient and exotic laser isotope separation process.

Protests Over Method

This plan, however, has run into opposition from environmental activists and some arms control experts, who are concerned that it would allow the government to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the used fuel of commercial reactors--thereby breaching a long-established barrier between civilian and military nuclear technology.

In addition, the Energy Department is seeking to spend nearly $7 billion to build at least two new military production reactors, mainly to generate fresh supplies of tritium. A form of hydrogen gas that boosts the power of nuclear weapons, tritium decays radioactively at the rate of 5.5% a year and must be replenished in weapons every few years.

The nation’s only tritium production reactors, three units more than 30 years old at the Savannah River Plant, are shut for extensive safety improvements. Senior Energy Department officials said last week that despite major managerial and hardware changes still to be accomplished at the plant, they expect to have all three reactors running by the end of next year.

A year ago, in a study commissioned by the department, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences said the three reactors “show definite and understandable signs of aging” and were clearly “approaching the end of their original design lifetimes” of 20 to 40 years.

The Energy Department has proposed building one new reactor at Savannah River during the next 10 to 12 years and at least one more, of different design, at the Idaho facility. To build only one new unit, officials maintain, would leave the nation’s nuclear force in jeopardy in the event an accident or unforeseen safety problem shut down the sole source of perishable tritium.