Tri-Valley CAREs

Friday, July 15, 2005  
Remove Plutonium From Lab, Task Force says

By: Keay Davidson
Published In: San Francisco Chronicle, page B-1, copyright 2005

"Draft paper by federal advisory panel urges nuclear materials be centralized elsewhere"

Keay Davidson, San Francisco Chronicle Science Writer

LIVERMORE, CA

Livermore residents who fear nuclear accidents or terrorist attacks at the weapons lab down the street will be able to breathe a sigh of relief if the recommendations of a federal task force are carried out.

The report, still in draft form and dated July 13, advises protecting civilian populations by moving plutonium out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- where 1,500 pounds of the fissionable material are now stored -- and shipping it to a centralized lab elsewhere, probably in the American desert.

The shipment would be part of a massive consolidation of U.S. nuclear materials. Such materials are now scattered throughout the nation's nuclear weapons facilities -- which the report depicts as a bloated complex rife with redundant functions.

The draft report comes from the U.S. Energy Department's six-member Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force led by physicist David Overskei of San Diego. Overskei, who received his physics Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later was a senior vice president at General Atomics in San Diego, is chairman of the energy secretary's advisory board. Overskei is also president of Decision Factors Inc., which bills itself as providing "strategic analysis of complex programs and issues."

For years, anti-nuclear activists have warned that Livermore's cache of plutonium -- an element that, if inhaled even in trace amounts, can cause cancer -- poses a dire public threat, especially in the post-Sept. 11 age of terrorism.

On Thursday, Livermore spokeswoman Susan Houghton said the lab would not comment on the Overskei panel's report "because it's a draft report."

Until last year, Livermore officials were seeking permission to double the amount of allowable plutonium storage on site.

The Overskei report says that moving all of the nation's "special nuclear materials" such as plutonium out of Livermore and other national labs to a single, centralized lab "will substantially increase (U.S. nuclear weapons) Complex efficiency, and reduce Complex transportation, security, and other operating costs, while limiting the number of Complex sites and civilian communities contiguous to the Complex sites that could be targets of terrorist attacks."

The same point is elaborated elsewhere in the report: "Consolidation would result in reduction of risk to adjacent civilian populations." It noted that four U.S. sites -- Livermore lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Y-12 plant near Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex plant at Amarillo, Texas -- "are sufficiently close to residential and commercial structures such that any partially successful terrorist attack on these sites may cause collateral damage to the surrounding civilian population and associated public and private assets."

The report drew mixed reactions from lab-watchers Thursday.

"The plutonium at Lawrence Livermore is not safe," said Marylia Kelley, leader of one of the Bay Area's most visible anti-nuclear groups, Tri-Valley Cares. "This is a highly populated area -- 7 million people live within a 50- mile radius of the lab, and there are earthquake faults less than 200 feet from the site boundary. This is the perfect time for the DOE to make the decision to permanently halt plutonium operations at Lawrence Livermore and undertake a study to decide where the plutonium should go."

Others faulted not so much the report's ideas as its proposed schedule for reforming the nuclear complex. The report talks about the need to plan for a new nuclear weapons complex by the year 2030.

But given the current prevalence of terrorism, "what the hell are we going do over the next 25 years? We face some really significant problems (in the nuclear complex) in the next five years," said Pete Stockton, a spokesman for the independent Project on Government Oversight in Washington, a frequent critic of the national labs.

He advises moving the plutonium out of Livermore "in a matter of months .. . because of the encroaching neighborhood."

In the past, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, whose district includes the Livermore lab, has resisted calls for immediate removal of the plutonium from the lab. In April 2004 she told The Chronicle: "I'm not going to tell you security is perfect, but, because of criticisms, they have made dramatic improvements and have invested sizable amounts of money to increase security."

On Thursday, though, Tauscher issued a statement saying: "I welcome many of the ideas" in the report, "which raises important issues that should be part of a larger discussion about the future of our nuclear weapons policy and our weapons complex."

E-mail Keay Davidson at [email protected].

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