Plutonium Waste Poses Deadly Problem : Cold War: Tons of radioactive matter from weapons program may have to stay in temporary storage for 20 years, Energy Department says.

The Energy Department has no permanent solution for disposing of 50 tons of radioactive plutonium waste from the Cold War weapons program, and it may have to continue using temporary storage facilities for as long as 20 years, department officials told Congress on Thursday.

As an interim solution, the department is considering the possibility of storing some of the waste in abandoned military bases around the country, officials said in a report released earlier this week.

The disposal issue is one of the thorniest facing the department. Plutonium poses “significant dangers to national and international security” because of the possibility that it could fall into the wrong hands and be fashioned into a nuclear bomb, Energy Undersecretary Charles Curtis said in testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Only about 10 pounds of plutonium is needed to build a bomb.

Of the estimated 100 tons of weapons-grade plutonium in the United States, only half will be retained by the federal government for use in nuclear weapons. No plans have yet been devised for disposing of the remainder.

Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), committee chairman, said that, although the problem is a serious one for both the United States and Russia--which possess the bulk of the world’s plutonium--the pace of the search for a solution has been “torpid at best.”

In addition to solving the plutonium disposal problem, the Energy Department must decide what to do about the millions of pounds of radioactive waste from other sources that is being stored in 29 temporary sites around the nation. Many of the containers are rusting and threatening to release radioactivity. Inspection teams are attempting to assess the extent of the danger, a department spokesman said.

In contrast, most of the surplus plutonium is held at relatively few sites, the largest of which is the department’s Pantex plant near Amarillo, Tex., which has the job of dismantling nuclear weapons. About 6,000 plutonium pits are contained in so-called igloos on Pantex land.

The proposal to store the waste at military installations appears to be the result of protests from Texas authorities over the storage at Pantex.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary has promised Texas officials to limit the storage there, raising the problem of where to put the material.

Efforts to find a permanent storage site have run into a number of technical and environmental roadblocks. A federally appointed panel led by Stanford University Prof. Wolfgang Panofsky suggested that the plutonium could be used in commercial reactors to make electricity or be converted into glass logs in a process called vitrification.

But Johnston raised concerns that the only U.S. reactors capable of using the plutonium are scheduled to be closed. It would take another decade to build a new reactor for the job, Panofsky said.

Thomas Cochran, a physicist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview that a single reactor can consume on average of one ton of plutonium. Using that calculation, it would take 50 years for a single reactor or 25 years for two reactors to use the entire surplus.

Ultimately, the plutonium, which remains radioactive for 20,000 years, must be buried. After exhaustive research, the federal government selected a site in Yucca Mountain, Nev., but years of additional study will be needed before any radioactive materials are entombed there.

“Many of the other proposals, like diluting the plutonium in ocean currents, launching it into outer space and detonating warheads, hardly seem to be serious alternatives,” Johnston complained.