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Friday, April 07, 2006  
Plutonium will be removed from lab

By: Keay Davidson, Science Writer
Published In: San Francisco Chron icle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/07/BAGGCI59D31.DTL

LIVERMORE



Administration sets 2014 deadline for moving chemical



Amid long-standing public concerns about safety, all nuclear-weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium will be shipped out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to another site by 2014, Bush administration officials say.

The presence of the radioactive material -- enough to make dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, in fast-growing Livermore immediately adjacent to suburbs -- has been a long-standing source of anxiety for local anti-nuclear activists.

Its presence has also attracted intense criticism from federal investigators who have repeatedly raised questions about safety at the lab, and its possible vulnerability to terrorist attack. The lab has been under fire recently, after a federal investigation of a 2004 incident in which five workers somehow ended up with plutonium in their noses. The case led the nation's nuclear weapons czar to charge publicly that it "casts significant doubt on the Laboratory's ability to effectively analyze and correct performance problems."

Trucks will probably be used to ship the nuclear materials out of the lab sometime before 2014, but their ultimate destination remains undetermined, lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton said Thursday. She said one possible destination is another U.S. national laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Previously, federal officials have speculated about the possibility of consolidating all the nation's plutonium at a single highly guarded lab in Nevada.

The newly announced plan to remove the so-called category one and category two nuclear materials out of Livermore was mentioned briefly in Washington on Wednesday in the middle of a long address to a House committee by Thomas D'Agostino, deputy administrator for defense programs at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.

"Our plan is to remove all category one-two SNM (special nuclear material) from LLNL (Livermore lab) by the end of 2014," D'Agostino told the committee, according to a copy of his speech posted online at www.house.gov/hasc/schedules/.

The announcement was startling, considering that until recently administration officials were talking seriously about the possibility of doubling the amount of plutonium at the lab.

Houghton said "we're very supportive (of the NNSA plan to remove the plutonium). We understand the need to do this."

Lab officials said the lab has 880 pounds of plutonium and is authorized to store up to 1,540 pounds. It also has a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium, another lab official told The Chronicle.

Last year, the NNSA authorized the lab to double its supply of plutonium should it choose to do so. The decision contradicted an earlier recommendation by an expert panel for the Energy Department, chaired by San Diego physicist David Overskei, that had advocated moving virtually all plutonium out of the lab and other existing national labs to a safe, remote site for the purpose of "limiting the number of (nuclear weapons complex) sites and civilian communities ... that could be targets of terrorist attacks."

In February, though, during a visit to Livermore, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks said there was no firm commitment to increase the plutonium at the lab.

Houghton says she does not know whether there might be an increase in the lab's plutonium before it is all shipped out by 2014. "It's too soon to say exactly what the present plans are," she said.

The news follows one embarrassment after another for the lab's plutonium handlers.

In December, The Chronicle broke the story about the accident involving the five lab workers who were exposed to plutonium, and Houghton initially denied the lab had any responsibility for the incident and claimed no Livermore staffers were involved -- only three employees of a private contractor. Later, though, she called to acknowledge that she had erred and that two Livermore employees were among the five workers exposed to the plutonium.

In February, the lab's management of its plutonium came under severe fire in a report by the U.S. Department of Energy. The report investigated the case of the five workers. The report charged Lawrence Livermore was to a large degree to blame for the plutonium-in-the-nose cases. The case revealed "the need for significant improvement in (the lab's) nuclear safety culture," NNSA chief Brooks told lab officials in a letter accompanying the report.

Security concerns in general spurred lab officials to announce on Feb. 2 that they were purchasing Gatling guns, a type of multi-barreled machine gun, to guard the lab against terrorist attack.

In 2004, federal investigators from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued a report criticizing safety standards at Livermore's Building 332, where the plutonium is stored. The report warned of the possibility of a plutonium fire that could continue for days. In an updated report Oct. 7, 2005, the board complained that safety-related procedures inside Building 332 still were less than adequate.

That same year, Building 332 was shut for security improvements. It still hasn't returned to full service.

The National Nuclear Security Administration decision pleased a veteran local anti-nuclear activist, Marylia Kelley of Tri-Valley CARES (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment).

"We applaud the decision to remove plutonium from Livermore lab even as we realize the devil will be in the details," she said in a statement Thursday. However, 2014 isn't soon enough for her group: "We will press for both a more speedy removal plan and for appropriate packaging to safeguard workers and communities from the handling and transportation hazards posed by these deadly materials."

E-mail Keay Davidson at [email protected].

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