TVA OKs fuel from weapons production

TVА OKs
fuel from
weapons
production
Uranium used to make
bombs will be converted into
electricity for utility.

BY DUNCAN MANSFIELD
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KNOXVILLE — In a post-Cold
War effort to beat swords into
plowshares, uranium once used to
make bombs will be converted into
fuel to make electricity at the
Tennessee Valley Authority.

The TVA Board of Directors,
meeting in Muscle Shoals, Ala.,
agreed Wednesday to enter into
the unique relationship with the
U.S. Department of Energy.

The federal utility intends to
convert into commercial fuel some
33 metric tons of highly enriched
uranium that once powered the
shuttered weapons production re-
actors at the Savannah River Site
in South Carolina.

By 2005, this reprocessed ma-
terial could be generating power
for homes across the Tennessee
Valley through TVA's Browns Fer-
ry Nuclear Plant in Athens, Ala.

The deal represents a potential
cost-savings windfall both for DOE
and TVA, but some critics worry
about the message it sends the
world about mixing commercial
and military nuclear activities.

Of the 33 tons of uranium, which
DOE declared surplus from the
weapons program in the early
1990s, two-thirds is stored at the
Savannah River Site and the other
third at the Y-12 nuclear weapons
plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Diluting the material into low-
enriched uranium "to where it is
considered a waste and could be
disposed of would be extremely
expensive. We are talking in the
range of about $1 billion," DOE-
Oak Ridge spokesman Steve Wy-
att said.

TVA gets the uranium free. But
it will pay $90 million to $100 mil-
lion to have it diluted at the Nuclear
Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tenn.,
and then repackaged into reactor fu-
el at a Siemens Power Corp. facility
in Washington state.

"The savings are derived in a
reduction in future fuel expenses
over what the market conditions
would be," said Jack Bailey, TVA
vice president for nuclear engi-
neering.

Assuming uranium prices stay un-
changed, TVA could break even
around 2010.

The DOE material, once con-
verted, could fuel Browns Ferry's
two operating reactors for 14
years.

No other utilities expressed in-
terest when DOE first proposed the
giveaway in the early 1990s as a way
to reduce the amount of weapons-
grade material in its nuclear stock-
pile.

Bailey said TVA's history of in-
volvement in the country's defense
programs — ever since it supplied
massive amounts of electricity for
the top-secret bomb-building Man-
hattan Project in Oak Ridge in World
War II — "made it easier for us" to
take up DOE's offer.

TVA, the country's largest pub-
lic power producer, more recently
has agreed to supply the bomb ma-
terial tritium to DOE from its Watts
Bar and Sequoyah commercial nu-
clear plants in Tennessee, beginning
in 2003.

TVA had planned to use the re-
formulated DOE fuel in the Sequoyah
reactor near Chattanooga, and even
tested a fuel sample there in 1999.

But Bailey said the tritium pro-
duction at Sequoyah could present
a conflict. When DOE agreed to take
the uranium out of its stockpile, it
also agreed the material would
again be used for weapons
production.

Stephen Smith, director
Southern Alliance for Clean
Energy environmental group
in Knoxville, said that conflict
remains.

"The downside is clearly the
continued blurring of lines between
commercial and the military
applications of nuclear power," he
said. "I think it sets a bad precedent.
We lose some of our credibility
as an international broker (to dis-
suade similar actions abroad)."

TVA is a self-financing
government corporation that provides
electricity to 158 distributors serving
some 8 million people in Tennessee,
Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina,
Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.