4 Scientists Fight Funding Of Idaho N-Waste Research

Four nuclear scientists are siding with the chairman of the House Budget Committee and against Gov. Phil Batt on a radioactive waste treatment program the governor sees as critical to federal compliance with his unprecedented nuclear waste deal.

The scientists have urged key members of Congress to cut off cash for pyroprocessing research by Argonne National Laboratory at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

They call it a dangerous waste of tax money. Advocates claim pyroprocessing can stabilize spent fuel so that it can eventually be moved out of Idaho as Batt’s 1995 deal requires.

“We find this claim to be highly questionable,” physicists Frank Von Hippel and Thomas Cochran, chemist James Warf and engineer Peter Johnson wrote in a letter to key members of Congress.

“In fact, pyroprocessing would produce new waste forms that have not been evaluated with regard to their stability over the long term or to their acceptability in a geologic repository,” they wrote.

In January, House Budget Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, included the pyroprocessing research on a list of 12 “corporate welfare” programs that wasted federal money and should be slashed from the budget.

Argonne scientists are working on a process to separate reactive sodium that cannot be buried in whatever permanent dump the government establishes from the radioactive spent fuel that can.

Batt acknowledged in his own pitch to preserve the $25-million-a-year research program that nothing can legally stop Congress from killing the project. But he warned that without it, some of the waste will not be processed for permanent disposal and therefore could not be removed from INEEL as the waste agreement calls for.

And once a deadline for removal is missed, the governor pointed out, access to INEEL for temporary storage of additional Energy Department nuclear waste through 2036 will be cut off.

Batt’s letter had no effect as a Kasich spokesman said the congressman intended to move against it and the other 11 programs outlined.

The support from the four scientists appeared to only reinforce that resolve.

Critics contend pyroprocessing sabotages U.S. efforts to discourage nuclear bomb-making worldwide because weapons-usable uranium is extracted from the fuel.

Argonne scientists counter that a hostile nation or terrorists possessing the technology could pull weapons-usable uranium out of the process in midstream, but even then they would have only enough to yield a weak albeit extremely radioactive device that could not be handled without heavy radiation shielding.

Officials said there are far easier ways to extract weapons-usable uranium or plutonium from nuclear fuel.