TVA Considers Watts Bar Tritium Plan

TVA Considers Watts Bar Tritium Plan
By DAVE FLESSNER
Business Editor

The Tennessee Valley Authority will decide next week on a controversial plan to make a key component of nuclear bombs at either of two East Tennessee power plants.

The decision would mark the first time the United States has used a commercial nuclear plant for military purposes. The vote on the proposed agreement between TVA and the Department of Energy will also be the first for TVA's two new directors, who began work in the agency's Knoxville headquarters this week.

The first board meeting next Wednesday for TVA Directors Skila Harris and Glenn McCullough could have global significance.

TVA has offered to use either its Watts Bar or Sequoyah nuclear plants to make tritium, a radioactive gas that boosts the explosive power of hydrogen bombs. The Department of Energy reached an agreement last month with TVA on what it would pay for the tritium production. TVA officials insist the pact will benefit both the power utility and national defense.

"As a federally owned corporation, TVA has a history of supporting national defense and an obligation to cooperate with other governmental agencies," TVA spokesman John Moulton said Wednesday.

But critics of the agreement claim it undermines American efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"This will be a significant change in U.S. policy and will make it much harder for us to limit the spread of nuclear weapons in other parts of the world," said Hisham Zerriffi, senior scientist and adviser at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington, D.C. "How can the U.S. argue against Iran's commercial nuclear program for being part and parcel of its military arsenal when we are also mixing our military and commercial nuclear programs?"

TVA began pitching for the tritium production last year as a way to use its unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Hollywood, Ala. The federal utility tried unsuccessfully to convince DOE to take over Bellefonte and finish it as a military facility for tritium production. TVA would recover its investment in Bellefonte by selling the electricity generated in the process.

But Energy Secretary Bill Richardson urged TVA to offer its existing nuclear plants for tritium production instead. DOE chose TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tenn., as its primary tritium source. The Sequoyah plant near Soddy-Daisy would be used as a backup site to make the bomb material.

Tritium may be produced in the normal operation of a nuclear power plant by inserting tritium-producing burnable absorber rods into the reactor core. The hydrogen isotope would be extracted and inserted in the hydrogen bomb at DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Even environmentalists concede that tritium production won't significantly raise safety risks at the nuclear plants where it is produced.

"We regard it like lead paint on a grenade -- it simply isn't that significant compared with the overall risk of a nuclear plant," said Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But anti-nuclear activists worry that the tritium production at TVA plants will prolong both the nuclear arms race and the use of nuclear energy.

"We have enough tritium for the next 30 years," said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance. "Our tax dollars are being used to wastefully produce something we don't need and will make the world a lot more unsafe."

To maintain the current stockpile of nuclear weapons, the military estimates it will need additional tritium supplies by the year 2005. Because tritium decays over time, TVA estimates it may have to begin producing the bomb material in the year 2003 for the United States to maintain all of its existing nuclear weapons.

But if Russia were to ratify the latest Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, tritium would not be needed for at least another decade.

"TVA doesn't get anything out of this deal and the taxpayer is being asked to pay to keep a whole fleet of nuclear subs around the globe filled to the brim with nuclear weapons that we no longer need," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Tennessee Valley Energy Reform Coalition. "I would hope the new board members will recognize that and reject this deal."

The TVA board will consider the tritium contract with DOE at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the TVA headquarters in Knoxville.