HANFORD WATCH NEWSLETTER
May 9, 1999
DOE TO LET RICHLAND LAB RUN FFTF STUDY
Tri-City Herald – May 4, 1999
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is expected to announce some good news
today for the Fast Flux Test Facility. He is planning to ask Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory to oversee a 90-day study of the Hanford
reactor. At the end of 90 days, Richardson will decide if the reactor
should be shut down permanently or DOE should proceed with an extensive
environmental study of the reactor. The study would be required to restart
it. The 90-day study will answer questions such as why the FFTF is needed,
what it would be used for and why it's the best choice for proposed
missions. Officials at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., have advised
Richardson to shut the reactor down to avoid further controversy.
FFTF is DOE's most modern research reactor. It operated
from 1983 to 1992 as a test site for nuclear fuel and components. Since
1993, DOE has considered it surplus but has left liquid sodium in its
cooling loops so it could be restarted. If restarted, it most likely
would operate at one-quarter capacity.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0504.html
OPPONENTS CALL FFTF STUDY 'THROWING GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD'
Tri-City Herald – May 5, 1999
Opponents of restarting FFTF criticized the decision as just more study,
with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., calling it "throwing good money after bad."
"Instead of searching for a rationale for this boondoggle, it's time
to shift the department's focus back to cleaning up the dangerous mess
that's already there at Hanford," he said.
Greg DeBruler of Columbia River United said no truly cost
effective mission for a reactor the size of FFTF will be found and called
any proposal PNNL puts together "another pork-barrel scheme."
"You can fit more credibility between a rattlesnake's
belly and the dirt than in a study by a Hanford contractor on whether
to restart Hanford's FFTF reactor," said Gerald Pollet, executive director
of Heart of America Northwest. Should an environmental impact study
be called for, he pledged to launch a [Washington] ballot initiative
for November 2000 that would bar addition of nuclear and toxic wastes
from FFTF operations to Hanford waste storage and disposal facilities.
That would leave FFTF with no economically practical way to operate,
he said. The state has legal authority to block use of storage or disposal
facilities for newly generated nuclear waste because facilities at Hanford
are decades away from coming into compliance with environmental laws,
he said.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0505.html#anchor596187
INITIATIVE RESULTS MIGHT SURPRISE FFTF OPPONENTS
Tri-City Herald editorial – May 7, 1999
Gerald Pollett, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, pledges
that if an environmental impact statement is authorized for restarting
FFTF, he would seek a state ballot initiative to thwart it. Presumably,
his campaign would center on the kinds of remarks he made about Battelle
and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researching uses for FFTF
if it were restarted: "You can fit more credibility between a rattlesnake's
belly and the dirt than in a study by a Hanford contractor on whether
to restart Hanford's FFTF reactor," he said. That's Pollett's -- and
Heart of America's -- level of debate. They like sensation. They like
name-calling. They love emotionalism. They dislike facts.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/OPINION/0507.html#anchor596187
HANFORD ANSWER IN HAND: SHUT DOWN FFTF REACTOR
Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial-- May 6, 1999
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has made a mistake in giving Tri-Cities
officials 90 more days to come up with a reason not to shut down the
Fast Flux Facility reactor at Hanford. FFTF supporters have had much
more than 90 months to justify the reactor's continued operation and
they still haven't succeeded in making a credible argument for it. This
latest reprieve is a waste of time and money -- millions of dollars
that legally is required to be spent on cleaning up the waste that's
already at Hanford, not on devising needless schemes to add more. Critics
rightly complain that it stretches credulity to have Battelle, a firm
with a financial interest in restarting the reactor, conduct a study
to see if it's needed.
The FFTF is not to be used for making tritium, Richardson
wisely has concluded. So if it's not needed for national security, and
medical experts say it's not needed to make medical isotopes, why are
we still talking about this? It's not the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers
to provide make-work jobs for residents of the Tri-Cities: Especially
not the kind of work and endless expense that's created by running the
FFTF.
http://www.seattle-pi.com/pi/opinion/fftfed.shtml
HANFORD RESERVATION GETS REPRIEVE FOR FURTHER STUDY
The Oregonian – May 5, 1999
By Joe Fitzgibbon for The Oregonian
By LINDA ASHTON of The Associated Press
RICHLAND, Wash. -- An experimental reactor at Hanford Nuclear Reservation
was granted at least a 90-day reprieve by the U.S. energy secretary
Tuesday for additional study of potential missions, including production
of medical isotopes or plutonium for space batteries.
http://www.oregonlive.com/outdoors/99/05/ou050502en.html
[There is not one word in this article about the opposition to FFTF
from the Oregon state legislature, Gov. Kitzhaber, Sen. Wyden, Rep.
Blumenauer, Oregon Office of Energy, Hanford Watch, Hanford Action,
Don't Waste Oregon, etc]
CHINESE ESPIONAGE PROBE PUSHES BACK CALL ON FFTF
Tri-City Herald – May 1, 1999
Congressional members supporting an environmental impact study signed
on to a letter sent this week by U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., urging
the study. U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., was not among them. Inslee,
who used to represent the Fourth District and now represents the First
District, sent his own letter. He opposes an environmental study on
the Hanford reactor, he said. Instead, he wants an overall - or programmatic
- environmental impact study on DOE's production needs, including the
need for radioactive isotopes to diagnose and treat disease. "Attempting
to proceed directly from a FFTF site-specific EIS to a production program
at FFTF will surely draw needless lawsuits and cost taxpayers million
of dollars," he wrote.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0501.html
LETTER TO BILL RICHARDSON RE: DECISION ON FFTF
Nuclear Control Institute – April 27, 1999
We are writing on behalf of the Nuclear Control Institute concerning
your impending decision on the future of the Fast Flux Test Facility
(FFTF) at the Hanford site. Given the environmental, proliferation and
economic risks associated with any attempt to restart this aging liquid-metal,
fast-neutron reactor, we ask that you make the sensible decision and
order decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) of FFTF to proceed without
further delay.
Now, a medical-isotope production mission is being put
forward by some as justification for keeping the reactor on standby
or for restarting it, but this is simply an inappropriate choice from
a technical perspective. A medical-isotope mission for FFTF was previously
eliminated by DOE. The National Institute of Medicine and experts from
the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
also hold the view that FFTF has no place in medical isotope production.
If you were now to authorize preparation of an EIS on
FFTF, it would take at least another three years before a Record of
Decision were issued and five years before the reactor could be restarted.
This would push difficult decisions on FFTF beyond your watch, but taxpayers
would be saddled with the cost of keeping the dormant reactor alive
during this period. [$40 million per year.]
http://www.nci.org/c42799.htm
DOWNWINDERS BLAST STUDY ON CANCERS
The Spokesman-Review – May 6, 1999
Angry Hanford downwinders are continuing to challenge an $18 million
draft study that found a weak link between Hanford's Cold War radiation
releases and thyroid disease in a group of exposed people. At a meeting
in Spokane on Wednesday, the critics had a succinct message for the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control: They don't believe the results of
the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, released Jan. 28 with Page One national
headlines.
There will be changes in the final Hanford study later
this year after a scientific peer review, the CDC's Mike Donnelly said.
The National Academy of Sciences review has already flagged a number
of errors in the study, including mistakes in some of the dose calculations,
which are being corrected.
http://www.spokane.net/news-story.asp?date=050699&ID=s571937&cat=section.Environment
BISHOPS SEE GOD IN A RIVER THAT'S RESTORED
The Seattle Times – May 2,1999
But the Columbia also has been called a sewer, useful for carrying toxic
wastes from farms and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. And an ecological
disaster in which dwindling runs of salmon are an indicator of the fate
of everything and everyone that depends on it.
"We've had such a utilitarian attitude toward the river,
all of us," said Loretta Jancoski, dean of theology at Seattle University
and one of the presenters. "The river is telling us that's got to change.
This is a test of whether we really understand that here's a river that
ties us to the creator, a river that has spiritual significance, that
gives people a livelihood. And yet it's a river that's dying in our
midst."
http://archives.seattletimes.com/cgi-bin/texis.mummy/web/vortex/display?storyID=372dd17419&query=Hanford
DYSFUNCTIONAL DOE
The Washington Post -- April 30, 1999
It's not the theft of secret nuclear-bomb data that should worry politics.
The big secret of the bomb is that a half-century after Hiroshima, there
is no secret, whatever the reality is behind disputed reports of China
receiving computer codes stolen from the bomb-designing Los Alamos National
Laboratory.
The real problem is that the chief custodian of the American
bomb industry, the U.S. Department of Energy, is a legendary sinkhole
of bungling and confusion that long ago outlived its original purpose.
Ironically, some of the country's top scientists and research managers
work for DOE but are embedded in an ironbound system that defies reform.
The theft stories -- and DOE's shifting and contradictory responses
-- are simply another episode in the history of America's most dysfunctional
government department. Except, that is, in its role as the preeminent
pork barrel of national politics.
If change could be wrought by shocking reports from blue-ribbon
panels and hard-nosed government auditors, DOE would long ago have been
reorganized out of existence, with its important functions distributed
to government agencies that competently manage research. From 1980 through
1996, the General Accounting Office recently reported, DOE squandered
$10 billion on 31 projects that were terminated before completion. Among
DOE's surviving projects, the GAO found, "27 had cost overruns averaging
over 70 percent and 16 were behind schedule."
The GAO added that experts in DOE affairs were almost
unanimously pessimistic about the potential for change. One was quoted
as saying, "DOE's organization is a mess. You cannot tell who is the
boss." The GAO concluded that "fundamental change remains an elusive
goal" at DOE. The immunity to change in the department can be traced
to a long run of strategically placed legislators with hometown reasons
to keep DOE and its laboratories alive and rich. The problem that really
needs attention is the senseless permanence of the DOE dinosaur.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/30/200l-043099-idx.html