I. OAK RIDGE

II. PADUCAH

III. PORTSMOUTH

IV. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION

V. US NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

VI. US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

VII. DEPLETED URANIUM

VIII. RUSSIAN URANIUM

IX. URANIUM PRODUCTION

I. OAK RIDGE

A small group of DOE investigators arrived at the K-25 site the week of March 13 to make a preliminary evaluation in order to plan DOE’s detailed investigation of the plant. DOE wants to study past activities and current cleanup operations. The full team is to start work in late spring or early summer and plans to finish its report by September. The investigation will be headed by Dr. David Stadler, deputy to Dr. David Michael’s DOE’s assistant secretary for the environment, safety, and health. Stadler also headed up DOE investigations at Paducah and at Portsmouth. (Frank Munger, News-Sentinel, 3/7/00)

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is creating a health advisory board for Oak Ridge, under the auspices of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The board will make recommendations to several federal agencies on how best to address health problems at Oak Ridge. It will be made up of members nominated by community residents but appointed by ATSDR. Critics of the plan are seeking a clinic to treat the sick rather than what they anticipate will be further study of contaminants. (Larisa Brass, Oak Ridger Online, 3/3/00)

British Nuclear Fuels Limited

Following a series of scandals involving British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL)-contaminated pigeons, sabotage, and more especially falsification of quality control records in regard to the fabrication of mixed oxide fuel--Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced that he would send a team of investigators to England to meet with British investigators of BNFL. He has also ordered a thorough review of BNFL’s work in the United States under contract with DOE. BNFL has almost $9 billion in contracts for cleanup operations at DOE plants. The contracts are in part a result of obtaining, with an American partner the Morrison Knudsen Corporation, many of the assets of Westinghouse Corporation, a DOE contractor. They are also a result of direct bids and negotiations.

The contracts include a $238 billion contract to decontaminate and decommission three process buildings at Oak Ridge’s K-25 enrichment plant. DOE gave BNFL the K-25 contract, without receiving bids from other companies, because, DOE said, BNFL had done similar work at the British Capenhurst enrichment facility. In actuality, the New York Times points out, BNFL has not decontaminated the nickel at the Capenhurst plant, although DOE wanted BNFL in particular to decontaminate the nickel at K-25.

Furthermore, the process BNFL intended to use for the nickel is now the subject of a patent dispute and of criticism by a federal district court judge in Washington, who described it as “entirely experimental”; and DOE has put the recycling of nickel on hold. (Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, 3/22/00)

BNFL is wholly owned by the British government, but is planning to sell 49 percent of its shares to private companies. The government will withhold approval for the partial privatization if the company does not meet certain targets including a 15 percent increase in profits in America. Richardson’s investigation therefore jeopardizes the privatization plan.

March 23 DOE received a petition asking it to suspend existing cleanup contracts with BNFL and to bar it from future contracts. The Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP) presented the petition, which was signed by forty groups.

Under Portsmouth below, also see Hearing on Oak Ridge and Portsmouth,

II. PADUCAH

Upgrading Paducah

DOE will pay the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) $4.8 million to evaluate ten of the thirteen DOE Material Storage Areas (DMSAs) at the Paducah plant that may contain high-enriched uranium and be subject to a criticality event (a brief but intense chain reaction). DOE identified the DSMAs as potential problems, during the first phase of its investigation of the plant last fall. The DSMAs, which have been off limits to USEC, have slowed USEC’s work to upgrade the plant’s protection against earthquakes. The seismic upgrade is essential to USEC’s plans to increase the plant’s enrichment capability. (James Malone, Courier Journal, 3/2/00; Prepared testimony of William Magwood, 3/16/00 )

USEC hopes to have received approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to enrich uranium to 5.5% uranium 235 at Paducah by the end of the current year, USEC spokesperson Elizabeth Stuckle says. The company plans to have all its submittals concerning the upgrade to the NRC by June. About one fourth of the needed changes at the plant have already been made. Up until now, Paducah has only had an authorization to enrich to 2.75 % uranium 235. Currently uranium enriched at Paducah is shipped to Portsmouth to be enriched to the level needed for power plant fuel or weapons. USEC would not be able to close the Portsmouth plant and operate only the Paducah plant without the upgrade. (Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun, 3/3/00)

Beryllium

Reviewing groundwater sampling data, the Paducah Sun learned that beryllium was found in more than a hundred samples taken from monitoring wells at Paducah in the past decade. Levels in the samples were higher than the .004 parts per million at which water destined for human use would have to be purified. Most of the samples came from the vicinity of scrap metal and uranium burial yards and of a building where precious metals were recovered. In 1998 beryllium was found in twenty-two samples from the west side of the plant, with the highest reading “seven times above the standard.” Dr. Steven Markowitz who is directing a health study for DOE at the plant says that testing for beryllium in blood would be easy, but that he needs to have sufficient information about who is likely to have been contaminated, to obtain permission from DOE to add beryllium to the testing program. (Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun, 3/5/00)

Past abuses

The Paducah Sun has printed an account of gross health and safety problems at the plant based largely on an interview with Don Copeland, who worked at the plant from 1951-1984. For much of the time Copeland was a supervisor. He reported that workers in the most contaminated buildings had safety equipment at hand but were not required to use it. One of the dirtiest operations was the C-720 converter shop where workers cut old barrier tubes open. The production buildings were less contaminated than the conversion and decontamination installations, but even they had problems. In 1962 a converter in one of them exploded and caught fire. Workers were told to melt the debris, and send it down the drain into a ditch leading to the Ohio River. (Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun, 3/26/00)

Harold Hargan, who worked as a chemical operator at the Paducah Plant from 1953 to 1992, met with an Atomic Energy Commission official in 1970 to discuss his concerns about health and safety at the Paducah plant. He told the official about widespread use of alcohol within the plant, careless handling of toxic and radioactive materials, and workers’ use of materials from the plant to clean and plate their fine arms. The meeting seemed to cause “some management re-alignments.” (Associated Press story in The Paducah Sun, 3/27/00)

Vortec vitrification facility

A February 25 draft of an internal DOE report on the Vortec waste vitrification facility planned for the Paducah plant recommends that the project be discontinued, the Courier Journal, which obtained a copy of the report, revealed. The team reviewing the facility found that it would be more expensive than less risky alternatives. DOE has already spent $30 million on the project and would have to spend $22 to $26 million more to get the facility, as yet unbuilt, going.

The facility would heat low-level radioactive waste and toxic chemical waste, mixed with glass-making materials such as silicon dioxide, up to 2800 degrees to produce an inert glass-like substance. DOE, compelled by a 1997 suit, did an Environmental Assessment of the project, but not, as environmentalists contend is needed, an Environmental Impact Statement. Leah Dever, who heads DOE’s Oak Ridge operations office signed a finding of no significant impact in March; but the Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet is waiting for additional information before deciding whether to give a “treatment permit.”

Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) is pushing for the facility, and Vortec Corp. of Collegeville, PA, which is developing the facility, has hired former US Senator Vance Hartke to speak for it in Washington. According to DOE spokesperson Lisa Cutler in Washington, DOE has not yet made a decision about whether to continue to fund the project. (James R. Carroll and James Malone, Courier-Journal, 3/31/00; Associated Press, 3/31/00)

Nickel ingots

The Paducah Sun published a letter from John Tillson, a “former site investigator” in regard to a story in the newspaper on nickel ingots. Tillson states that the ingots contain technetium at levels as high as 50,000 parts per billion. “The contaminated nickel and aluminum ingots largely represent the final form of scrap diffusion plant material” and result from the tearing down, shredding, and melting of metals from compressor and converter units. The compressor and converter units were contaminated with transuranics as well as with technetium; but, when the metal was melted, the transuranics concentrated in the slag at the top of the melt and, to a lesser extent, in the furnace liners. The slag and most liners went into the classified burial ground. (We do not have the original story in the Sun, and it is not clear to us whether Tillson is referring only to specific ingots at Paducah and, if so, whether the ingots are all in the classified burial ground.) (John Tillson, Paducah Sun, posted on www.state.nv.us , 3/31/00)

Hearing on cleanup

The US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s subcommittee on energy research, development, production, and regulation held a hearing March 31 on cleanup plans for the Paducah plant and surrounding area. The only congress person present was Senator Bunning, who announced that a General Accounting Office (GAO) report that he had requested will show that DOE has underestimated cleanup costs at Paducah. In order to clean up the plant by the target date of 2010, DOE would have to spend $124 million a year. DOE is proposing spending $78 million in fiscal year 2001. At present funding levels, cleanup will not be completed until 2021. The figures come from a preliminary version of the report; the final report is scheduled to be released to the public in April.

Witnesses for DOE included David Michaels, assistant secretary of the Office of Environment; Carolyn Huntoon, assistant secretary for environmental management; and William Magwood, director of the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology. Topics they discussed included the Vortec vitrification facility (see above) and conversion of depleted uranium hexafluordie (see Depleted Uranium below). In response to a question about the presence of parts from disarmed nuclear weapons, Bob DeGrasse, a defense programs administrator, said that DOE and the Department of Justice are investigating and will not know for six months what is in the burial grounds or the likelihood that their contents will further contaminate the environment.

Other witnesses included John Driskill, president of the plant guards’ union, and Keith Dinger, an official of the National Health Physics Society. Driskill said that security has been cut back since 1993 and that some security personnel have been terminated or punished because of speaking out about problems. Calling for an independent investigation, he also reported that the DOE office in Tennessee, which oversees the Paducah and Portsmouth plants, often pays no attention to orders from DOE’s Washington headquarters. (Joe Walker, Paducah Sun, 4/1/00; Nancy Zuckerbrod, Associated Press, Ohio News Archive, 3/31/00)

III. PORTSMOUTH

The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) has completed a program to dilute for DOE 14 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) that DOE had had in its defense stockpile. The program was laid out in a Memorandum of Agreement that DOE and USEC signed in 1994. The first stage was the actual downblending, which took place at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The second stage was the plant’s cleaning of the cylinders that had contained the HEU. The downblending was completed in July 1998; the cylinder cleaning in March 2000. (USEC Press Announcement, 3/16/00)

Hearing on Oak Ridge and Portsmouth

US Sentaors Fred Tompson (R-TN) and George Voinovich (R-OH) organized a hearing in the full Senate Governmental Affairs Commitee, March 22. The committee looked into what operations took place at Oak Ridge and Portsmouth, what DOE has learned from its investigations at the enrichment plants, to what contaminants workers were exposed, and how workers can be compensated for resulting health problems. Witnesses included Ann Orrick, a worker at Oak Ridge who is dying of cancer; Vikki Hatfield, daughter of a former worker at Oak Ridge who is now dying of kidney failure and berylliosis; Sam Ray, a retiree from the Portsmouth plant who suffers from cancer of the cartilage in his throat; Jeff Walburn, currently a guard at Portsmouth who has experienced respiratory problems since an accident occurred at the site in 1994; Dr. Steven Markowitz of the City University of New York Medical School who is leading a health study of enrichment workers; and David Michaels, assistant US secretary for environment, safety, and health. Vina Colley of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS) attended the hearing and spoke to the media but was not a witness.

In addition to harrowing tales of exposure to radionuclides and toxic chemicals and of subsequent illnesses, the senators heard accusations that at Portsmouth records of radiation dosage are inaccurate. Sam Ray claims that high doses on monitoring badges were attributed to failures in the badges and discarded. Jeff Walburn charges that officials changed his dose records after he was exposed to radioactivity and chemicals as a result of a 1994 accident. (The accident occurred after USEC took over operation of the plants; USEC has denied any wrongdoing.)

Dr. Markowitz told senators that he has found cases of lung and bladder cancer that are probably work related in several of the thousand workers at the enrichment plants whom he has tested. Twenty to twenty-five percent of the tested workers suffer from chronic bronchitis and/or emphysema, at least in part as a result of exposure to such materials as hydrofluoric acid at the plants; and about ten percent have non-malignant scarring that reflects exposure to asbestos. Almost all have moderate to severe hearing loss because of their work.

As a result of the hearing, DOE is looking into the charges of alteration of dose records at Portsmouth. Furthermore, the Clinton administration now recognizes that workers at the Portsmouth plant experienced similar conditions to those at the Paducah plant and should also be compensated, Deputy Energy Secretary T. J. Glauthier told Rep. Ted Strickland at a hearing of the House Commerce Committee’s energy subcommittee. The administration has not, however, decided on the form of the compensation that it will seek. (James R. Carroll, Courier Journal, 3/23/00; Jonathan Riskind, 3/25/00)

IV. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)

The House Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Billey (R-VA),will hold a hearing on the privatization of USEC April 13. This hearing will be only one part of the committee’s investigation of whether the privatization cheated taxpayers and endangers the survival of the US-Russian High-Enriched Uranium Agreement and the US uranium enrichment industry. Billey has asked USEC for information on the status of deliveries of low-enriched uranium under the Russian-US HEU Agreement and for facts on its sales of uranium, production costs, and freon inventories. It has also asked the US General Accounting Office to look into whether the US-Russian agreement has been harmed by the privatization and also by a subsequent “lack of oversight” by the Clinton administration. The GAO is expected to deliver its report in late summer. The committee plans to hold subsequent hearings before the November election. (Jonathan Riskind, Columbus Dispatch 3/29/00; Uranium Institute News Briefing, 3/15-21/00 from FreshFuel, 3/20/00)

V. US NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION (NRC)

As a part of its investigation into whether USEC can ensure “the maintenance of a reliable and economical source of domestic enrichment services ( see UEN, March 2000), the NRC has asked USEC to provide its five-year business plan and other financial information. (Uranium Institute News Briefing, 3/8-14/00)

March 17 more than a hundred organizations sent letters to President Clinton and NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve opposing a plan by the NRC to shift from formal to informal hearings. Formal hearings give the public the right to obtain documents through discovery and to cross-examine hearing participants; informal hearings deny the public both rights. The NRC has asked the Senate to approve the change in procedure

(Pubic Citizen Press Release, 3/17/00)

VI. US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)

Rep. Tom Billey (R-VA) and five Republican colleagues from the House Commerce Committee and the House Science Committee have introduced a bill that would transfer from DOE to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) the authority for the regulation and enforcement of nuclear safety matters and to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) the authority for all non-nuclear worker safety matters at DOE sites. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which today advises DOE, would be abolished. (Boston Globe Online, downloaded 3/15/00)

VII. DEPLETED URANIUM

March 10 the governors of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee sent a letter to President Clinton to urge funding of the construction of facilities that would convert the depleted uranium hexafluoride stored now in cylinders at the states’ gaseous diffusion plants. Bob Taft of Ohio and Don Sundquist of Tennessee warned that if DOE fails to allocate money set aside by Congress for the purpose, their respective states will enforce agreements that would require DOE to handle the uranium hexafluoride as hazardous waste. The letter contained no such threat from Kentucky. (Joe Walker, Paducah Sun, 3/16/2000)

March 23 DOE explained its delay in issuing its Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion Services Request for Proposals (RFP). The agency had announced that it would release the RFP by the end of 1999. However, because of expressions of concern about the possibility of transuranic material in the depleted UF6 as a result of the handling of uranium from irradiated fuel at the enrichment plants, it has “launched a program to sample the inventory and assess the contamination.” The program is expected to conclude in the middle of the current fiscal year. DOE will then issue an amended schedule, which will take into account the results of the assessment. The agency hopes to issue the final RFP later in 2000. (DOE Announcement to DU Management Program mailing list, 3/23/2000)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has confirmed for the first time that troops used depleted uranium munitions in Kosovo. Some 31,000 rounds were fired in about 100 missions. (Uranium Institute News Briefing, 3/22-28/2000, based on Guardian 3/22/00)

VIII. RUSSIAN URANIUM

The Russian nuclear fuel fabrication company Tvel has acquired control of the Ulba metallurgical plant (UMZ) in Kazakhstan. In exchange, UMZ will obtain shares in various Russian nuclear plants. The deal was hastily concluded, some believe to thwart US certain nuclear companies. During the Soviet era, UMZ supplied uranium oxide pellets to Russian fuel fabricators. Since Russia and the United States have been in strong disagreement over uranium prices, certain US companies have reportedly shown an interest in UMZ, because obtaining control of UMZ would have allowed them to impact Russian uranium pricing. (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 3/17/00)

The “Federation Council upper house” of the Russian parliament has asked the Russian government “to review the expediency” of the Russian-US High-Enriched Uranium (HEU) Agreement and “to specify its implementation procedure.” It has also decided to address President-elect Vladimir Putin on the subject. Russia has already sold 45 tons of HEU in diluted form to USEC and earned some $1 billion US from the arrangement. The money has been spent on restructuring and converting its defense industry. (ITAR-TASS News Agency, 3/29/00)

IX. URANIUM PRODUCTION

World uranium production fell 12% in 1999 from 70 million to 62 million .pounds of U308. The decrease in production was in part due to the large supplies of uranium, represented by USEC’s uranium inventory and the to-be-diluted stock of Russian high enriched uranium, likely to come on the market. (Uranium Institute News Briefing, 3/15-21/00)