[ RadSafe ] US Plans To Restart Its Own Plutonium Production - NYT

[Sandy Perle]

Index:

US Plans To Restart Its Own Plutonium Production - NYT
Japanese, French bids to host nuclear fusion reactor
Inspectors examine Japan nuclear plant over missing enriched uranium
Fifteen countries participate in dirty bomb exercise in Vienna
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US Plans To Restart Its Own Plutonium Production - NYT

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- The Bush administration is planning the 
government's first production of plutonium 238 since the cold war, 
The New York Times reports in its Monday edition.

According to the report, federal officials say the program would 
produce 150 kilograms over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory. 
Officials say the program could cost $1.5 billion and generate more 
than 50,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

The Times said that one speck of the substance, valued as a power 
source, can cause cancer.

Project managers say that most of, if not all, of the new plutonium 
is intended for secret missions and declined to divulge details, the 
newspaper reported.

The report said that in the past, the substance has powered espionage 
devices.

"The real reason we're starting production is for national security," 
Timothy A. Frazier, head of radioisotope power systems at the U.S. 
Department of Energy, told the paper in a recent interview.

Today, the U.S. makes no plutonium 238 and instead relies on aging 
stockpiles or imports from Russia, the report said. By agreement with 
the Russians, it can't use the imported material - about 35 pounds 
since the end of the cold war - for military purposes.

With its domestic stockpile running low, the report said, Washington 
now wants to resume production. Though it last made plutonium 238 in 
the 1980s at the government's Savannah River plant in South Carolina, 
it now wants to move such work to the Idaho National Laboratory and 
consolidate all the nation's plutonium 238 operations there, 
including efforts now at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New 
Mexico and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
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Decision due on Japanese, French bids to host multibillion dollar 
nuclear fusion reactor

MOSCOW (AP) - A decision is expected on Tuesday on rival bids from 
Japan and France to host a multibillion dollar nuclear fusion 
reactor, an official in Russia's Atomic Energy Agency said.

The six parties involved in the project - Japan, the United States, 
South Korea, Russia, China and the European Union - are meeting in 
Moscow to discuss where it should be built, officials said. France is 
seen as the front-runner.

Japanese newspaper reports have said that Tokyo is prepared to give 
up on hosting the US$13 billion (10.8 billion) International 
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project in return for a bigger 
research and operations role in the project.

However, Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said earlier this 
month that negotiations were continuing up to the wire.

The ITER plant aims to show that nuclear fusion presents a vast, safe 
source of energy that can wean the world off pollution-producing 
fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions and 
only low levels of radioactive waste.

The six parties have been divided over where to locate the plant. 
Japan, the United States and South Korea want it at Rokkasho in 
northern Japan. Russia, China and the European Union want it at 
Cadarache, in southern France.
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Government inspectors examine Japan nuclear plant over missing 
enriched uranium

TOKYO (AP) - Government inspectors on Saturday examined a nuclear 
power plant in central Japan hoping to discover how a small amount of 
enriched uranium disappeared from storage there, as the plants 
operators scrambled to track down the missing substance, officials 
said.

The amount lost does not contain enough radioactivity to pose a 
threat to humans or to make a bomb, a Science Ministry official 
Kunimi Yoshida said.

The incident surfaced Friday when plant officials notified the 
ministry that they had been unable to locate a finger-size neutron-
detecting device that contained 1.7 milligrams of enriched uranium at 
the No. 3 reactor at Takahama nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture 
(state), about 32 kilometers (200 miles) west of Tokyo.

The ministry has ordered the plant operator, Kansai Electric Power 
Co., to find the missing device, which is used to measure the level 
of neutrons in the reactor.

Plant workers discovered the instrument was missing during an 
inspection of the plant's nuclear fuel inventory.

The whereabouts of the uranium were last known on July 6, 2004, 
during a previous inspection of the plant's inventory, the ministry 
said.

On Saturday, two officials from the Science Ministry inspected the 
plant as Kansai Electric officials and workers scrambled to find the 
missing object. The inspectors also interviewed plant officials and 
inspected their documents, Yoshida said.

Officials didn't know what caused the loss, Yoshida said. "We must 
find the thing first."

The trouble comes less than a year after another plant run by Kansai 
Electric, also in Fukui, caused Japan's deadliest-ever nuclear-plant 
accident.

In August, a corroded cooling pipe carrying boiling water and 
superheated steam burst at a plant in nearby Mihama, killing five 
workers. No radiation was released in that accident.

Kansai Electric later acknowledged that the part of the pipe had not 
been inspected since the plant was built in 1976. It is being 
investigated on suspicion of negligence causing death.

The government has been aggressively pushing nuclear power to meet 
the energy needs of resource-poor Japan, but public trust has been 
deeply shaken by a series of safety violations, reactor malfunctions 
and accidents in the nuclear energy industry.

Japan's 52 nuclear reactors supply 35 percent of the country's 
electricity. The government wants to build 11 new plants and raised 
electricity output to nearly 40 percent of the national supply by 
2010.
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Fifteen countries participate in dirty bomb exercise in Vienna

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Soldiers and experts from 15 countries 
participated in an exercise Thursday that simulated the explosion of 
a dirty bomb in Vienna, the Defense Ministry said.

The exercise was the culmination of a weeklong training session 
carried out under NATO's Partnership for Peace Program, said Gerhard 
Ruhm, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry. About 130 soldiers and 
experts from 15 countries, including the United States, Germany, 
France, Britain and Italy, took part in the exercise.

About 40 people portraying victims wounded by the dirty bomb - a 
weapon that uses conventional explosives to spread radiation - also 
participated in the simulation.

Austria joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program in 1995. The 
alliance created the program in 1994 to establish cooperation with 
neutral and former communist countries.

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Sandy Perle
Senior Vice President, Technical Operations
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
2652 McGaw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92614 

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