Reactor’s Future Is In Warheads Restarting Fast Flux Would Be To Produce Tritium, Not Isotopes

When the topic is the Fast Flux Test Facility at the Hanford nuclear reservation, folks here usually are discussing whether the test reactor has a future in medicine, producing radioactive isotopes to treat some cancers.

But at the federal level - seven years after the U.S. Energy Department announced that Hanford’s mission had changed from bomb-making to environmental cleanup - the interest in keeping the FFTF running would be to produce tritium for nuclear warheads.

A 1995 National Institute of Medicine study of the growing isotope market said it made no sense to restart the reactor for isotope production.

Top DOE officials’ sole interest in restarting the FFTF is its ability to make tritium, a quickly decaying radioactive gas that boosts the power of nuclear warheads.

“All the Department of Energy cares about is tritium,” said Madelyn Creedon, the DOE’s deputy secretary for national security.

Gerald Pollet, one if DOE’s harshest critics as executive director of the Hanford watchdog group Heart of America Northwest, says area political leaders were deliberately misled.

“There has been a bait-and-switch scam to convince elected officials to support a reactor for medical work when all the planning and official consideration is solely for nuclear weapons production,” he said.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary is to decide by Christmas if the FFTF should be added to a short list of sites being considering to produce tritium. Sites in New Mexico and South Carolina are also in the running. It costs $60 million a year to keep the FFTF on stand-by status.

On Wednesday, retiring Gov. Mike Lowry went on record against the restart - the most powerful Washington politician to do so. And the key for him was the prospect of a tritium-only mission.

“People think this is about medical isotopes and it is not,” Lowry said. “We’re talking about tritium production.”

Lowry’s statement couldn’t have come at a worse time, said Sam Volpentest, executive vice president of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council and one of the reactor’s biggest advocates.

“You couldn’t print what I’d like to say,” he said. “I don’t think he (Lowry) will be coming back to the Tri-City area for quite a while.”

Lowry press secretary Jordan Dey says Lowry’s statement is not a reversal.

“The governor has always been consistent, that the FFTF should be used for beneficial purposes, and this letter (to O’Leary) is consistent with that,” Dey said.

While many area residents would prefer a humanitarian mission for Hanford, Congressman Doc Hastings and other Tri-Cities leaders say they’ll support an FFTF restart even if it’s solely for tritium.

The restart could bring as many as 820 new jobs at a time when Hanford employment has dropped from 18,000 to 13,400 in two years.

But some politicians who backed a restart for isotopes would think twice about a tritium-only mission.

In May, Hastings, Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and Democrats Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Norm Dicks signed a letter to O’Leary urging the restart. Gov.-elect Gary Locke also pledged support for the project.

But Murray said this week that she would reconsider if medical isotopes aren’t a major part of the DOE’s plans for the reactor.

“If DOE comes back and says medical isotopes are off the table, I’m going to question what’s really in this for my constituents in the TriCities,” she said. “DOE has a lot of questions to answer.”

DOE’s tritium-production decision “has to have the region’s support or it’s not going to happen,” she said.

“But the project has always been presented as something that would give us the option to have medical isotopes and meet the needs of the medical community. Everyone in the Tri-Cities and the region deserves to know what the mission is that DOE is proposing.”

Locke is reconsidering as well.

“It started becoming apparent to us in recent weeks that civilian use is not a possibility for this facility,” said Tim Ceis, who is heading policy development for Locke during his transition from King County executive to governor. “We’re going to have to re-evaluate our position in consultation with community and interest groups.”

There’s no consensus even at DOE.

Jim Mecca, director of Hanford operations in Richland, insists that isotopes can be an important part of the deal. Even if the DOE decides it needs the FFTF to make tritium, Mecca said, at least one assembly in the reactor could be set aside for simultaneous isotope production.

Even Hastings, who is pushing for the restart because he wants to see the facility privatized for isotope research, says that “the ground keeps shifting.”

State Attorney General Christine Gregoire, who negotiated the 1989 cleanup agreement with the DOE, said the department’s openness policy clearly hasn’t come far enough.

“It’s offensive for Energy to sit behind closed doors and make decisions and deliver them to the communities and states being affected by them,” she said.

Creedon said the public will be given ample opportunity to comment if Hanford makes the short list for tritium production.