Abstract
A “hohlraum” to be bombarded in the National Ignition Facility at Livermore lab. The lab's 10-year environmental statement reveals that Energy wants to fill hohlraums with tritium gas on site, something it had said previously it would not do.
No plans for new nukes here!
If you thought all the talk about new nuclear weapons was just hot air, the proposed environmental plan for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a cool reminder that the Energy Department is moving ahead with plans to ramp up production of plutonium pits and other materials for a rejuvenated nuclear weapons program.
It has been more than 10 years since Livermore's “Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement” has been updated, and the National Environmental Policy Act required that Energy produce a review to cover Livermore's planned operations for the next 10 years. The proposal offers a rare glimpse into the government's plans for the top-secret weapons lab.
If Energy gets its way, Livermore will be allowed to house twice the plutonium and work with nearly 10 times the radioactive tritium it does now, reports the February 21 Contra Costa Times. The lab will also start research on how to manufacture plutonium pits (nuclear weapon cores) using modern robotic manufacturing techniques. The lab currently cannot separate large quantities of weapons-grade plutonium or fabricate the dense metal into pits, things that Los Alamos National Laboratory (Livermore's “sister” lab) is able to do.
The nearly tenfold increase in tritium-handling capacity, reports the February 26 Tri-Valley Herald, would allow Energy to resume nuclear weapons testing in 18 rather than 36 months if President George W. Bush ends the 12-year moratorium on nuclear testing. Tritium is used in the sensitive instruments used to evaluate nuclear explosions.
Livermore scientists would also use the tritium for filling small metal or glass spheres used as targets in fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility–the world's largest laser–whose construction is beginning to wind down.
Marylia Kelley, executive director of the Liver-more watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs, says that in the mid-1990s her organization was told that Livermore would never fill targets on site because the lab is just too crowded. “Lo and behold,” she says, “that is what they want to do. And every time they increase their tritium workload, more tritium gets into the environment.”
“The most important thing in all this,” says Kelley, “is that this is a 10-year planning document–and it demonstrates that this administration is planning a long-term future for making weapons at the lab.”
She says it's ironic that while Livermore is planning to double the amount of plutonium it can handle (from 1,540 to 3,300 pounds), some Energy officials want to “de-inventory” Liver-more because of security problems.
Many of Livermore's security problems are linked to the lab's location, Kelley says. Unlike Los Alamos, where plutonium facilities are spread out over 43 square miles of remote land, Livermore's plutonium facilities are crammed into an area just 1.3 square miles in size. “Livermore lab is unique in the weapons complex because of how close the buildings are to each other,” she says.
“The plutonium facilities are next to tritium facilities, which are next to both the lab's internal streets and local public roads. There are people driving right next to the Superblock where work with radioactive materials takes place. It's a very difficult complex to defend because it's an extremely crowded site.” With nearly 10,000 employees and subcontractors coming and going through the lab's gates, it is also very busy.
Kelley adds that more than 7 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the complex, and there are several airports in the area with flight paths carrying planes directly overhead. “This is not a place where you can house plutonium and defend it easily,” she says, noting that in addition to overflights the danger posed by either terrorists or disgruntled employees is very real.
Unlike other labs in the nuclear weapons complex, Lawrence Livermore is near residential areas populated by millions.
“This is why Tri-Valley CAREs supports the de-inventorying of plutonium and highly enriched uranium at Lawrence Livermore.”
Where does Kelley suggest Energy do the work? “A good deal of the work done at this lab duplicates the work done at Los Alamos,” she says, and her organization rejects the idea that new labs need to be built if Livermore's plutonium and tritium-handling capacities are not increased. “This is an opportunity to make Lawrence Livermore safer and to build down the dangerous, duplicated, and unnecessary activities of the nuclear complex.
“If you want to maintain the current arsenal, you do need some plutonium capacity, but what exists at Los Alamos is far in excess of what's needed. But if you're hell-bent on new weapons, what's planned for Livermore is exactly what you'd do.”
Another dangerous proposal in the Livermore plan is to triple the at-risk limit for how much plutonium can be in a single room at one time. The amount requested is not arbitrary but linked to specific projects such as developing prototype plutonium bomb cores and new processes for separating plutonium with lasers. “They want to be able to do anything they want to do and not tell anyone about it,” says Kelley.
“We think this is extremely dangerous for the community and for proliferation. New nuclear weapons seem to absolutely be their intent. What's new is that this is now being disclosed.”
Does Kelley think the plan can be stopped? “If the public, scientific community, and our legislators come together to oppose these actions, they're stoppable,” she says. Energy plans on proposing a “record of decision” by January 2005, when the agency will advance its decision to expand activities at Livermore. Kelley says that if Energy chooses to go forward with the plan, her organization will consider litigation.
“It's a shocking blueprint for an increasingly aggressive and robust nuclear weapons program,” Kelley concludes. “And we're going to stop it if we can.
“It's a moral, scientific, and political imperative.”
Not as bad as it looks
In its response to twenty-first century terror worries, the United States decided it needed to better prepare for a variety of new scenarios, including a bioterror attack using smallpox. But the last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949–so how do first responders, doctors, and other emergency workers learn to spot and respond to the disease?
One answer: Fake it. Injury simulation plays an important role in disaster and emergency response training.
“We strive to make it as close to the real look and feel as possible–as anatomically correct as possible, so that doctors and nurses can take one look at it and know what they need to do,” says Marge Dolan, founder of Image Perspectives. Dolan's company coordinates mass casualty exercises and specializes in moulage services–using special effects and makeup to produce realistic injuries.
Image Perspectives' fake smallpox.
With products like DermaCrisp, InstaBlister, and It's Not (“perfect for depicting chemical exposure; simulates copious amounts of mucous,” reads Dolan's catalog), Image Perspectives creates, or trains others to create, fake injuries that can be handled, bandaged, and used again. The military; local, state, and federal agencies; airports, oil refineries, and chemical companies are among those that test their disaster response skills with the help of moulage.
Dolan has done exercises simulating smallpox in Iowa, bubonic plague in North Carolina, and, last year, a dirty bomb in Seattle. That scenario was one component of the Department of Homeland Security's TOPOFF 2, a five-day mass casualty exercise. In two hours, 34 makeup artists trained by Image Perspectives performed moulage on 160 volunteer victims, creating burns, broken bones, amputations, massive head wounds–every kind of injury that emergency rooms could expect to see right after a dirty bomb attack.
Business has been booming. “We've been inundated,” Dolan says. “All of a sudden, people are paying attention. They realize there's a need.”
Woomera wins
On July 14, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, bowed to intense political pressure and announced that his government was dropping plans to locate a nuclear waste dump in South Australia.
The question of where to put the new dump had led to increasingly combative relations between federal and state officials (sound familiar?), complete with name-calling and brash political maneuvering.
On June 24, Australia's full Federal Court ruled that the feds could not seize land near Woomera, South Australia, for use as a dump for low- and mid-level nuclear waste.
The Howard government had spent 12 years and upwards of $12 million to develop the plan to deposit roughly 170 truck-loads of waste in a proposed shallow, below-ground repository. Most of the waste has been generated by the country's sole research reactor, known as the Lucas Heights reactor.
In response to the government's plan, opponents of the Woomera site had pushed to have the site converted into a public park, which would have made it ineligible to be seized. The federal government labeled this move a “stunt,” accused state leaders of “reprehensible behavior of a cynical and opportunistic kind,” and responded by seizing the land before South Australia's legislature could act.
Instead of appealing the court's recent decision, Howard decided to drop the controversial plan altogether. His new plan is to have states store their own waste and to begin a search for a site outside South Australia (perhaps even outside mainland Australia) to store all the low- and mid-level waste produced by the feds.
These developments could have consequences for a new research reactor the government hopes to bring on line in 2005 to replace Lucas Heights. National elections are likely to be called before the end of the year, and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has said that, if elected, it will hold an independent inquiry into a number of issues relating to the reactor and defer granting an operating license to the reactor during that period.
The Lucas Heights research reactor.
“They could decide against the reactor on waste management grounds,” says David Noonan, an anti-nuclear campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation.
In the meantime, the waste from the Lucas Heights reactor, and any waste that would come from the replacement reactor, will continue to be stored on site, which is what many opponents of the Woomera site have advocated from the very beginning.
The entire affair has left relations between the Howard government and South Australia's government, headed by Premier Mike Rann, an ALP leader, severely strained.
After its July 14 decision, the Howard government went on the offensive and openly criticized one of the sites that South Australia's government had suggested might be suitable for the small amount of low-level waste that it is now responsible for.
An editorial in a leading Australian newspaper went so far as to question whether “the second tier of government in Australia is really worth preserving,” or whether state government “should be quietly buried somewhere suitably remote.”
In Brief
U.S. analysts studying high-altitude U.S. spy satellite photos of Iraq identified any number of what they believed were Scud missile storage sites that U.N. inspectors should investigate on the ground. But the analysts apparently confused missile storage bunkers with the short, half-cylindrical sheds that are typically used in Iraq to house poultry (Los Angeles Times, June 17). One former inspector told reporter Bob Drogin, “We inspected a lot of chicken farms.” He added that his U.N. inspection team finally ordered and donned gray T-shirts emblazoned with the title “Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team.”
The General Accountability Office (the agency formerly known as the General Accounting Office) is looking into complaints that before the war in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi and supported in large part by U.S. government grants, set up another organization–a nonprofit known as the “Iraq Liberation Action Committee.” The charge is that the committee's purpose was to disguise the fact that the INC was illegally funneling U.S. government funds into a prowar lobbying campaign. If true, as reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay noted on April 22 for the Knight-Ridder newspapers, it means that “U.S. taxpayers paid to have themselves persuaded that it was necessary to invade Iraq.”
According to a General Accountability Office (GAO) report released in June, between 1997 and 2003 the Defense Department spent at least $100 million on unused first-class airfares, but failed to cash in reimbursable tickets because employees did not bother to turn them in. In November 2003, the GAO had reported that the Pentagon bought 68,000 first-class or business-class tickets for employees who should have flown coach. The GAO also suspects that the government may have reimbursed employees for as many as 27,000 nonauthorized tickets.
The Indian Air Force simply whomped the U.S. Air Force in recent joint exercises–who'da thunk it? Especially when you consider that the U.S. airmen were piloting F-15Cs (called America's best fighter) while Indian pilots flew “low-tech Russian and French jets.” But maybe the loss wasn't so strange after all: “The U.S. Air Force brass is trying to spin their pilots' defeats against Indian fighters into cash for two new controversial, budget-busting jets” (DefenseTech.org, June 25).
Clothes from designer Miguel Caballero offer quite a bit more insurance against nasty accidents than do wrinkle-proof or stain-resistant items–they're bulletproof. Caballero's lightweight but “high security fashion”–let's call it Colombian chic–is aimed at the discriminating businessman or politician who just might find himself in more than the proverbial line of fire. Hidden bulletproof panels that can stop submachinegun rounds are incorporated into denim jackets, linen coats, and even casual guayabera shirts, among other designs. (We'd hope some of the items are sweat stain-proof, too.) Clients are said to include the mayor of Bogotá and the president of Colombia.
Eighteen years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 359 Welsh farmers are still unable to sell their sheep without testing them for radioactive contamination. The sheep in question are raised on farms in a 53-square-mile area where fallout from the nuclear accident in Ukraine was especially heavy. (One solution is to move the sheep to alternative grazing lands for a period before marketing them.) According to the May 17 Western Mail, one study suggests that it will take 50 years before all restrictions on agricultural items are scrapped in northern Europe.
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are apparently eager to help in the fight against terrorism by developing a detector to be used to scan the millions of large shipping containers that enter U.S. ports each year for the presence of nuclear materials. The Department of Homeland Security is so enthusiastic about Livermore's plan it is underwriting the project to the tune of $4 million for this year alone. Detection, reports Keay Davidson (San Francisco Chronicle, June 14), would involve a neutron beam fired through each container as it moved along a conveyor belt. The beam would split the atoms of any concealed uranium or plutonium, which would then emit its own radiation, which the detectors would pick up. There are a few as-yet-unsolved problems, among them that any illegal stowaways, who sometimes hide in large containers, would be irradiated, as would all the products being shipped in the scanned containers. Some folks at Livermore think imported foodstuffs and items like delicate wines might be shunned by consumers, whether or not they later remained on the shelf long enough for their radioactivity to decay to a safe level.
Iraq's peaceful atoms?
Add it to the list of ironies of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: On the to-do list of the interim Iraqi government is building a nuclear research program. And the United States could end up helping. Rest assured, the program would serve only peaceful purposes, says Rashad Mandan Omar, Iraq's interim science and technology minister.
“We want to treat ailments like cancer. For that we need nuclear science,” Omar told Agence France Presse (July 12). “But we are not going to have any false title for a project to conduct destructive research. That chapter is closed. It is finished. We are fed up of it.”
The Bush team has said it wants to help rebuild Iraq's scientific sectors, in part to find jobs for Iraqi scientists whose expertise presents a proliferation risk. The State Department has committed $2 million to the recently founded Iraqi Center for Science and Industry, which aims to “engage and redirect WMD scientists,” and more funding could be on the way. The suspected leader of Iraq's nuclear program under Saddam Hussein, Jafar Dhia Jafar, is among the scientists that the State Department hopes to bring into the program (Boston Globe, July 16). But what will these scientists be doing?
One of the priorities identified by a recent survey of Iraqi scientists conducted by Sandia National Laboratories is the need for more cancer research.
Iraq could buy foreign medical radioisotopes, but if it wants an indigenous program, as Omar has intimated, it would have to build a research infrastructure that could include a nuclear research reactor. This would have a broader impact on regional and global security.
“An attempt by Iraq to acquire a research reactor for production of medical isotopes would provoke its neighbors and increase proliferation risks throughout the Middle East,” says Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Where the United States stands on Iraq's plans is unclear, although it doesn't appear to anticipate a sovereign Iraq building a research reactor. In its waning days, the Coalition Provisional Authority established the Iraqi Radioactive Source Regulatory Authority, whose stated purpose is to “promulgate and enforce regulations to allow for the beneficial uses of radioactive sources … and to ensure the safety and security of radioactive sources.”
This definition of “radioactive sources,” though, does not include nuclear material within the nuclear fuel cycles of research and power reactors.