Local activists line up against MOX

Saturday, March 22, 2003 •

Coastal Empire

Local activists line up against MOX

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission holds a public hearing Monday about converting bombs to fuel at the Savannah River Site.

By Mary Landers
912 652 0337
landers@savannahnow.com

Savannahians will have a chance Tuesday to tell federal regulators what they think about a controversial plan to convert nuclear weapons into fuel at the Savannah River Site.

Called MOX - mixed oxide fuel - the program is being developed for the Savannah River Site just southeast of Augusta.

Sara Barczak, with Citizens for Clean Energy, sees the meeting on the draft environmental impact statement as a final chance for the public to officially weigh in on the process.

"This is pretty much the window of opportunity now," Barczak said.

Already, plutonium is being sent to SRS to clean up obsolete nuclear weapons facilities and to comply with international arms agreements. SRS plans to convert the plutonium into fuel for use in commercial nuclear power plants. The government says the process makes the material useless for future nuclear bombs.

But MOX is expensive. Critics fear it won't be fully funded, leaving unstable plutonium stored indefinitely at SRS.

Georgians for Clean Energy oppose the MOX facility, as does Greenpeace International. MOX's goals can be achieved better by other means, they contend.

"There are cheaper and safer ways to produce energy and there

are cheaper and safer ways to render plutonium undesirable to terrorists and rogue nations," Barczak said.

The MOX option was recommended by the National Academy of Sciences after it looked at peer-reviewed studies of many options, according to Rose Cummings, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, which plans to use the fuel.

"We wouldn't be getting into this if we didn't believe this was a good project and could be done safely," she said.

Barczak would rather see the plutonium immobilized by putting it into a ceramic form highly resistant to fire and dispersal in the form of fine particles.

That was part of the original plan, but the Department of Energy scrapped immobilization because of "budgetary constraints" and because the Russians objected to it. (Russia and the United States have agreed to reduce equal amounts of plutonium from their nuclear stockpiles.)

For Savannahians, Barczak sees the MOX threat as mainly from an accident or terrorist attack.

The bulk of the plutonium is in the form of plutonium oxide powder, which is highly dispersible in air, Barczak said.

Another local environmental group, Citizens for Environmental Justice, also opposes MOX.

Executive Director Mildred McClain said the government is failing to follow its own rules about involving minority communities in the decision making process.

She's also concerned with the accuracy of the NRC's risk assessment numbers. The draft Environmental Impact Statement indicates that an accident at the site could produce 400 latent cancer fatalities in the surrounding area, with minority or low income communities most likely affected. Earlier this month, the NRC issued a correction that downgraded that risk.

But McClain isn't buying it.

"The alarm went out to the nation and the state when people saw that (initial) number," she said. "Our thought is that they scrambled to say 'We made a mistake.'"

Pro or con, public comments can influence decision makers who evaluate environmental impact statements, according to Greenpeace International's Tom Clements.

"They have more worth for their political value than as an environmental document," he said.