Friday, Oct. 18, 2002 | 10:08 a.m.
Not one person spoke in favor of the Nevada Test Site becoming the nation's new nuclear bomb "pit" plant at a public hearing in North Las Vegas Thursday night.
"You get rid of Yucca Mountain and then maybe we'll talk to you," Judy Treichel, executive director of the watchdog group Nuclear Waste Task Force, said, referring to the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump approved by President Bush and Congress.
The Test Site is one of five sites on the Energy Department's list to replace a former production plant closed in 1989 at Rocky Flats, Colo., because of safety and contamination concerns, said Mike Mitchell, the National Nuclear Security Administration project manager.
The Test Site's remote desert location and its security are positive points for its selection, Mitchell said.
Nevada officials are concerned that the Test Site could become another Rocky Flats. The state has taken no position on the project that could cost between $2 billion and $4 billion to build, said Joe Strolin of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
At issue is the nature of the plutonium pits, which are the size of a softball and are at the heart of nuclear weapons. Pits would be made at the site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is currently making about 20 plutonium pits a year to maintain aging nuclear weapons.
A nuclear weapons program based at Los Alamos but approved for the Test Site has been shrouded in secrecy, Strolin said.
"The state has been unable to find out anything about the program," Strolin said. "There is universal concern at the state level that the facility not be another Rock Flats."
Jay Rose, in charge of preparing an environmental impact statement, said some information would be classified, but as much as possible would be open to the public.
About 125 plutonium pits would be made each year if a new plant opens in 2018, Rose said. The plutonium would arrive at the Test Site from the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas, in two shipments per month over the 50-year life of the plant.
Once the aging plutonium arrives at the Test Site, it would have to be processed, stripped of impurities by acidic solvents, then remade to replace the grapefruit-sized pits. The retooled pits would then return to Pantex for assembly.
Since liquid wastes are not buried at the Test Site, the waste streams would be changed into solid form at the site then shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, N.M., for burial, Rose said.
"We are trying to improve the process after Rocky Flats," Rose said.
FBI agents discovered plutonium contaminating ventilation systems and soils surrounding the Rocky Flats facility, about 20 miles from Denver.
Contamination potential and the possibility that the plutonium could go critical -- that is, create a nuclear chain reaction -- will be part of the analysis of all the sites, Rose said. Besides the Test Site, Los Alamos, the Pantex Plant, the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and the Waste Isolation Pilot Project are the sites being considered for the plutonium pit project.
The department plans to choose one site by April 2004. A preferred site could be chosen by May 2003.
The new plant is needed because plutonium pits decay over time, although it is not clear when they become useless in a weapon.
The only community that has welcomed the project is Carlsbad, near the plutonium burial site, Rose said. "I'd say it was 99.9 percent in favor," he said. Between 1,000 to 1,500 jobs would come with the project at an annual budget of $200 million to $300 million.
As for any further nuclear weapons activity, Kalynda Tilges, executive director of the Shundahai Network, told officials that no new projects are welcome.
"We want the DOE and the Nevada Test Site out of Nevada," she said.
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