No More Bang For Our Bucks : With so much tritium available, why take risks?
Tritium is a radioactive gas used to boost the explosive power of fission weapons and to initiate fusion in thermonuclear weapons. Tritium for U.S. weapons is produced at a 300-acre site along the Savannah River in South Carolina. In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences issued a devastating safety assessment of Savannah River’s five reactors; and after 1988, all were shut down.
By the end of fiscal 1992, the Department of Energy will have spent $3 billion trying to bring one or more of the five back on line. Most recently, however, two restarts of the facility’s K Reactor have led to leaks and rapid shutdowns. Eventually DOE may get the K Reactor running, but is the attempt worth either the money or the risk? We think not.
By the DOE’s own estimate, current supplies of tritium are adequate for 16 years, supposing a U.S. nuclear deterrent of 6,300 warheads. But last week, the United States and Russia were discussing new weapons reductions--to 4,700 or 2,500 warheads. An eventual compromise well below the current 6,300 level seems likely, further extending the adequacy of the U.S. tritium reserve. As Energy Secretary James Watkins recently said in testimony before Congress, the United States is “up to our eyeballs in tritium.”
The DOE plans to run the restarted K Reactor for a year simply to prove that the U.S. can supply its own tritium needs. But putting a problem-ridden, 38-year-old reactor without a containment structure in mothballs for 20 years or more and then starting it up strikes us as a high-risk strategy in more ways than one.
A much lower-risk, higher-payoff strategy would be to purchase tritium rather than manufacture it in an obsolete plant. Heavy-water reactors in Canada and India produce it as a waste product. So do reactors in the former Eastern Bloc. General Atomics, of San Diego, has offered to buy the uranium and plutonium in Russian missiles for sale to commercial users. DOE could well offer to buy the tritium.
Doing this would produce a second, perhaps even greater payoff; for unless the West buys the weapons of the former Soviet Union, there is every reason to fear that the cash-strapped post-Soviet republics will find Third World buyers. Outright purchase alleviates that risk.
The longer the U.S. can delay tritium production, moreover, the greater the likelihood of yet a third benefit. The DOE has spent more than $1 billion and budgeted (through 1997) another$2 billion to develop a successor to the K Reactor. But it currently favors--as tried-and-true technology--a modest update of the K reactor or, if needs are small enough, a linear accelerator. Out of favor is making the new tritium producer a prototype modular high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor. The MHTGR, unlike the K reactor, is a power generator, touted as inherently safe, and potentially the beginning of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Developing the MHTGR will take more time. But if a new tritium reactor is needed at all, let it be one that provides the taxpayers with something for their money besides a weapon.
