Depleted uranium
I. OAK RIDGE
Funding for state oversight
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has agreed to give at least $3.1 million to the state of Tennessee for monitoring environmental cleanup at Oak Ridge during fiscal year (FY) 2002. The funding will be shared by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation's DOE Oversight Division, the Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee, and the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. The FY 2002 money represents roughly what these entities spent in FY 2001, but is less than the $4.7 million that the state requested. Tennessee has received federal money annually since 1991 to monitor pollution problems at Oak Ridge. (Oak Ridger, 9/14/01; Frank Munger, 10/1/01)
Depleted uranium contract
Manufacturing Sciences Corp. has signed an eight-year agreement to manufacture tubes of depleted uranium for British Nuclear Fuels' Sellafield reprocessing plant. The agreement is worth $3 million a year. Manufacturing Sciences is a subsidiary of BNFL Inc., which in turn is the American subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels. For the tubes, Manufacturing Sciences will draw on its inventory of depleted uranium, which it obtained earlier from the US uranium enrichment plants. The company has manufactured depleted uranium tubes for Sellafield previously. In 2000 Manufacturing Sciences closed its radioactive materials recycling center.
It now concentrates on manufacturing projects. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, 10/26/01)
Worker contamination at ETTP
Six employees of R&R Electric charge that they were exposed to asbestos and probably also to PCBs when they worked for several months in 2000 cutting up old electrical condensers from the K-25 plant, now the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP). They were not given protective clothing ,and claim that they were told that the condensers were not hazardous. R&R is a subsidiary of American Technologies Inc., which bought the equipment from BNFL. R&R worked in space at Oak Ridge subleased from Southern Freight Logistics, which leases space at ETTP as part of DOE's reindustrialization program. Journalist Frank Munger notes that the alleged contamination raises the question of whether work rules and regulations strictly adhered to by DOE and its prime contractors are "loosely followed-or ignored altogether--at private operations taking place on the federal site." (Frank Munger, Knoxville News-Sentinel, 10/7/01)
II. PADUCAH
October 17 DOE held a teleconference from Paducah Community College on the possible recycling of radioactively contaminated scrap metal. Participants in Paducah were linked via satellite with officials in Washington, DC and Oak Ridge. DOE plans to hold a public hearing at Paducah before issuing a draft environmental impact statement in on the disposition of scrap metal in March. (See the August UEN.) The agency expects to generate a million tons of scrap metal in the complex as a whole within the next twenty years. At the present time Paducah stores 54,000 tons of contaminated scrap metal, more than any other facility in the DOE complex (Joe Walker, Paducah Sun,10/18/01; Tuss Taylor, Kentucky Environmental Oversight News, 10/01)
Western Kentucky Research Consortium
The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority announced September 27 that it would grant $400,000 towards creation of a Western Kentucky Energy/Environmental Research Consortium. Supporters of the consortium, including representatives of three state universities and Paducah Community College, planned to meet privately October 11 to discuss use of the grant. Bill Brundage, Kentucky's commissioner of the New Economy, says that the state money will be matched with $400,000 from other sources. The funds will be used to hire staff, organize the consortium, and seek grants and contracts for research. Consortium supporters would like to turn the Paducah Information Age Park into an energy/environmental research facility. (Joe Walker and Bill Bartleman, Paducah Sun, 10/1/01)
Neptunium exposure
Richard C. Baker, now retired but head of radiation protection at the Paducah plant for most of thirty-five years, testified in a deposition in September that urine tests of twenty-one workers carried out in 1961 showed that their bodies were contaminated with neptunium. However, he believed, he said, that the neptunium was the result of recent exposure to allowable levels of neptunium dust at the plant and therefore was not cause for alarm. He was not required by law to calculate the level of radiation to which workers were exposed, he explained. Baker was deposed in September by Louisville attorney William McMurry who is representing current and former plant workers and their families in a $10 billion suit against the Paducah plant's former operators and suppliers of uranium. According to McMurry, calculations based on accepted health physics practices indicate that the workers were exposed to much higher levels of neptunium dust than were permissible. (James R. Carroll, The Courier-Journal, 10/29/01)
DOE vs. the State of Kentucky on radioactive waste regulation
The State of Kentucky in 1996 granted a permit to DOE to operate a landfill at the Paducah site, but imposed the conditions that the landfill take no radioactive waste and only a limited amount of solid waste contaminated by radioactivity. DOE filed an administrative challenge against the conditions on the basis that only the federal government can regulate nuclear material at the facility. DOE lost the challenge, but was subsequently supported by a district court and the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The State appealed to the Supreme Court, but, in mid-October, the Supreme Court, without comment, declined to hear the State's case. (Associated Press, 10/15/01)
Cercla cell
Cleanup of the Paducah site will create at least 1.6 million cubic yards of contaminated waste. According to an article in Kentucky Division of Waste Management's Kentucky Environmental Oversight News, the Kentucky Division of Waste Management, US Environmental Protection Agency and DOE-Paducah have discussed at length options for managing these wastes. After considering the possibilities, regulators have agreed to permit DOE "to evaluate and demonstrate the viability of an on-site waste disposal facility" or Cercla cell, the article states. The cell would be "an engineered landfill," capable of containing 3.1 million cubic yards of waste and covering about 110 acres. The regulators have imposed two conditions. The first condition is that DOE must commit to excavating various burial grounds by stipulated deadlines before the division approves a feasibility study for construction of the cell. The burial grounds are sites that would not otherwise be excavated and in which the majority of radionuclides tend to move slowly through the ground. The second condition is that DOE adequately characterize the CERCLA cell to assess its viability. The assessment is to include a seismic investigation, including two fault studies, one on regional fault characteristics and the other on characteristics of DOE's preferred location for the cell, just east of the main entrance (Hobbs Road). Mark Donham of the Site Specific Advisory Board has complained in the past about the lack of information available to the public on the planned Cercla cell. (Brian Baker and Tuss Taylor, Kentucky Division of Waste Management, Kentucky Environmental Oversight News, 10/01; Mark Donham, Personal Communication)
III. PORTSMOUTH
NIOSH report
The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) held a public meeting at the Vern Riffe Vocational School, Piketon, October 4 to discuss its report "Mortality Patterns of Uranium Enrichment Workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant." The epidemiologic study examined the causes of death among all workers employed at the plant between September 1, 1954 and December 31, 1991. Researchers found significantly less mortality among the workers than in the US population as a whole from all causes and from all cancers. It also did not identify any dose-response trends (i.e., significant relationships between exposures and death) or any statistically significant excesses in mortality from any specific cause. The report did note however that the lower mortality among workers is consistent with what is known as "the healthy worker effect"-only healthy people receive jobs at a plant. It also noted that results of monitoring "for chemicals and various forms of radiation were incomplete." Workers questioned the report's conclusions. (
www.cdc.gov/niosh/2001-133.htm )
Sale of lithium
DOE has completed the sale of millions of pounds of lithium hydroxide monohydrate that had been stored at the Portsmouth plant since the 1960s. The nonradioactive material was used to make material for nuclear weapons in the 1950s and early 1960s. About seventy percent of the compound has been sold to TOXCO in California; the balance, to five other companies. The lithium hydroxide will be put to such uses as batteries, pharmaceuticals, and as an additive to concrete for the construction of roads. (EarthVision Environmental News, 10/12/01)
IV. US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)
Regulations to implement the Energy Employees Compensation Program
October 5 the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published in the Federal Register two rules under which the department will provide scientific expertise to assist in decision-making under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000 (EEOICPA). "Methods for Radiation Dose Reconstruction" was published as an interim final rule; "Guidelines for Determining the Probability of Causation" as a notice of proposed rulemaking. The interim rule specifies the methods that HHS will use in developing information that it will present to the Department of Labor (DOL) to help DOL evaluate claims by workers who seek compensation for certain cancers but are not requesting compensation under the "Special Exposure Cohort" provisions of the Act. The proposed rulemaking concerns the scientific guidelines that DOL will follow in using the information from HHS, i.e., "in determining whether it is at least as likely as not that an energy employee's cancer was caused by occupational exposure." HHS is seeking comments on the interim final rule within 30 days and on the proposed rulemaking within 60 days. Comments should be sent to the CDC/NIOSH Docket Officer at CDC/NIOSH Docket Office, Robert A. Taft Laboratories, M/S C34, 4676 Columbia Parkway, Cincinnati, Ohio 45226 or electronically to NIOCINDOCKET@CDC.GOV . The interim rule and proposed rulemaking are available at
www.cdc.gov/niosh . (CDC/NIOSH Press Announcement, 10/5/01)
September 7 DOE published in the Federal Register proposed procedures for implementation of Subtitle D of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act . Under Subtitle D, DOE is to assist employees in filing claims, with the relevant state workers' compensation system, based on the consequences of exposure to a toxic substance. To do so DOE is to set up independent physicians' panels to help determine the cause of workers' illnesses. Written comments on the proposed procedures were originally to be submitted by October 9, but the date was extended to November 8 after a public meeting on the proposal was postponed.
Two meetings on the physicians panels were held: October 10 at DOE headquarters in Washington and October 25 near the Cincinnati airport. At the Washington meeting, workers criticized the proposal, in part because it indicates that claims will be forwarded to medical panels for evaluation only if they meet criteria established by the relevant state workers' compensation laws, although the panels were supposedly to overcome obstacles set up by state programs. Workers also protested the proposal's stating that the panels are to determine whether it is "more likely than not" (rather than "as likely as not") that a given worker was made ill by his or her work. On the other hand, a spokesperson for the American Insurance Association praised the proposal for protecting the rights of states. At the Cincinnati meeting, remarks by workers included questions as to why the original legislation sidetracked chemical injury for workers at gaseous diffusion plants, although exposure to uranium hexafluoride and other toxic chemicals are major causes of illness among workers at these plants. The text of the Guidelines for Physicians Panel Determinations on Worker Requests for Assistance in Filing for State Workers' Compensation Benefits" can be found at
tis.eh.doe.gov/advocacy/index.html . (Nancy Zuckerbrod, Associated Press, 10/12/01; Vina Colley, PRESS, Personal Communication)
Defense Authorization Act
The Defense Authorization bill for FY 2002, which the Senate passed in early October (S 1148), included improvements in the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, among them allowing compensation for surviving children who were over eighteen when their worker parent died and relaxing criteria for a determination of benefits for silicosis. The House version of the bill (HR 2586) did not address the compensation program. The conference committee on the measure is scheduled to meet November 7.
Energy and Water Development Appropriations
The conference report on the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill for FY 2002 (HR 2311) was approved by the House and Senate November 1. It includes $7.4 billion for cleanup under DOE's Environmental Management program. This sum is $803 million more than the administration requested and $167.7 million more than the FY 2001 appropriation. (Energy Communities Alliance, Bulletin, 10/01)
Utility suits
on alleged overcharges
In October thirty-three domestic and foreign utilities sued the federal government for damages for alleged overcharges for enrichment services by DOE between FY 1985 and FY 1993. The utilities claim that they were mistakenly charged for interest on the gas centrifuge enrichment program after DOE had terminated the project and written off the costs. They also claim that DOE included high-assay uranium production costs in its prices after the department was no longer responsible for the high-assay program. Damages sought total more than $500 million. (Platt's Nuclear News Flashes, 15/10/01 and 16/10/01)
Security
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) released in October "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Security at Risk." The report presents the results of an eight-month investigation, which found that DOE has disregarded proven threats to nuclear security, thwarted efforts to improve this security, and carried out security tests that are unrealistic. The report does not mention the Paducah or the Portsmouth plants by name, but it does refer several times to Oak Ridge, because Oak Ridge's Y-12 site stores highly enriched uranium. The infrastructure is crumbling at Oak Ridge, the report notes, and plans to build new storage facilities for the uranium have become bogged down in bureaucracy. The authors of the report suggest combining the remaining functions of Oak Ridge and Savanna River at one site to avoid replacing the infrastructure at both sites. They also suggest storing fissile material for the entire complex at a single site such as the secure underground weapons storage facility at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico or the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Test Site.
Frank Munger in a column for the Knoxville News-Sentinel discusses the fact that the public is asking questions about security at the Y-12 site because of the highly enriched uranium. Munger notes that the facilities at Y-12 are "antiquated" with much of the nuclear material "housed in wood-frame structures as old as I am." Details of accident analyses have not been made public, but he surmises that "much of the hazard would result from the combination of fire and enriched uranium." (10/3/01)
At Oak Ridge's K-25 site and at Paducah and Portsmouth, cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride are obvious hazards. If uranium hexafluoride escapes into the atmosphere, it reacts with moisture in the air to form hydrogen fluoride, a corrosive gas, and uranyl fluoride, a soluble compound, toxic from both a chemical and a radiological point of view. An airplane crash that causes a fire is one of two possible initiators of releases from the cylinders that DOE identified in an environmental assessment. Security measures at Paducah and Portsmouth are undoubtedly designed to protect the cylinders and the process buildings and their contents. ("Refurbishment of Uranium Hexafluoride Cylinder Storage Yards . . . at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Paducah, Kentucky," July 1996)
The Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites were included in the Federal Aviation Administration's temporary ban on private planes flying within eleven miles of operating nuclear power plants and other specified nuclear sites. The ban, intended to avert terrorist attacks, was announced October 30 and is to expire November 7. (Associated Press, 10/30/01;
www.faa.gov )
Withdrawal
of information
As a result of the
attacks on the World Trade Center, DOE has removed information that it regards
as sensitive from its various Web sites and, in some cases, from its public
reading rooms. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability has acquired an
October 26 memo from Francis S. Blake, deputy secretary of Energy, to
"all department elements" asking them to "review the
operational information accessible to members of the public and remove or
restrict access, as appropriate, to information that may be used to target the
Department of Energy." A memo with more specific directions, also
obtained by the Alliance, went out from Kaye Sylvester of the Office of Policy
Planning and Budget in Environmental Management to "All" on October
18. We checked the site of the Oak Ridge Operations Office, www.oakridge.doe.gov
, for the results of these and other memos, the morning of November 7, as we
were about to put this newsletter online. The page of the Freedom of
Information Act office is unavailable. The reason is not specified and
could possibly be a technical problem. This page normally provides
access to documents released under the act. Among other unavailable
information is the page of BWXT Y12 and the Web sites of some listed contacts.
On the Web site of Defense Programs is a note, "The Defense Program (DP)
Web site is unavailable until further notice." The US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, as the media has widely reported, has also removed
information from its Web site to protect the installations that it regulates,
which include the Paducah and Portsmouth plants.
V. United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC)
Lawsuit on initial prospectus
Senior US District Judge Alexander Harvey II has ruled for the plaintiffs on several motions intended to move forward the consolidated class action in a federal securities fraud lawsuit against USEC. The plaintiffs charge that USEC gave an inaccurate picture of its prospects in the prospectus for the July 1998 Initial Public Offering. USEC made a motion to dismiss class claims, which the judge rejected. The judge approved the selection of lead plaintiffs and of two law firms as lead counsel. The suits were originally brought in federal court for the Western District of Kentucky but have been transferred to Maryland. (The Daily Record Online, 10/25/01)
Quarterly financial report
USEC has reported a loss for the first quarter of FY 2002 of $4.7 million or $0.06 per share, compared with a profit of $4.6 million or $.06 per share in the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter, which ended September 30, totaled $300.5 million, compared with $226.8 million in the first quarter of FY 2001. "The increase reflects significantly higher SWU volumes offset by lower average prices billed to customers, primarily due to the timing and mix of customer orders." The quarterly results have not caused the company to change its full-year guidance, which anticipates a net income of $35 to $40 million for the entire fiscal year. (USEC Press Release, 10/24/01)
Price Anderson Act
USEC is among the DOE contractors in the Energy Contractors Price-Anderson Group, an entity that supports the extension of the Price-Anderson Act. The Act, which was first passed in 1957, limits the liability of owners and operators of commercial nuclear power plants in case of an accident. It also protects DOE contractors. When USEC was privatized, Congress extended Price-Anderson coverage to the company, for its two operating enrichment plants and for work on Avlis at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Price-Anderson Act expires in August of 2002. On October 31 of this year, the House Energy and Commerce Committee marked up HR 2983, a reauthorization of the act, with language that would take away liability protection from DOE contractors who cause accidents through "intentional misconduct." (Inside Energy/with Federal Lands, 6/4/01; Energy Communities Alliance, Bulletin, 10/01)
See also USEC's strategy under Advanced Technology below.
VI. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY
Urenco's strategy
Pat Upson of Urenco discussed the firm's strategy at the World Nuclear Association's 2001 Symposium in September. The company has developed six generations of centrifuges since the early 1970s. The most recent, TC21, has been operating for six months in a lead assembly. Within the next eighteen months Urenco will decide whether to begin using it in production plants. The TC21 has a separation factor more than fifty times that of the early machines and an output double that of the TC12, presently in use, but is "much more complicated, with more components, and specifications which are more difficult to reach." Urenco will concentrate on improving the TC21 in coming years rather than on creating yet another new generation of machines, which would lead to plants less flexible to operate. (
www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2001/upson.htm )
USEC's strategy
October 2, at a seminar sponsored by the Nuclear Energy Institute, Dennis Spurgeon executive vice president and chief operating officer of USEC Inc. presented at some length USEC's position in regard to Silex and centrifuges. USEC will continue to invest in the development of Silex. The technology shows "promising results," but "process efficiency is not yet proven." On the other hand, with centrifugation, USEC "is not developing a new centrifuge technology" but is "merely replicating that which was demonstrated by DOE in 1985, but with improvements and at a lower cost." DOE's advanced machines performed "at more than 300 SWU [separative work units] per machine per year, it's good enough!" The USEC machine is "larger than competing technologies" and "will cost about twice as much as the latest generation of competing technology, [but] it will produce about four times as many SWU." [Ed: It is not clear whether Spurgeon refers to Urenco's TC12 or TC21 (see above).] Thus, Spurgeon says, capital costs per SWU will be lower.
USEC is seeking a second year extension of a DOE-approved Cooperative Research and Development Agreement or CRADA, under which it has been working on centrifuges in cooperation with UT-Battelle at the East Tennessee Technology Park at Oak Ridge. It hopes to demonstrate centrifuge performance under an extension of the CRADA and is ready to finance an extension, but needs DOE support in the form of access to Oak Ridge facilities and UT-Battelle personnel, plus approval for continued use of DOE intellectual property. Following a successful demonstration, USEC plans to license, construct, and operate a lead cascade "at a gaseous diffusion plant." It will then seek financial partners to construct a centrifuge plant, which it will expand incrementally. (Platt Nuclear News Flashes, 10/2/01; speech available at
www.usec.com )
An additional US enrichment initiative
Officials of Exelon and Duke have sent a letter to President Bush stating that a group of US utilities and additional partners are "actively seeking to deploy proven and competitive enrichment technology in the US." They asked the administration not to take any steps that would give a special advantage in building a new plant in the United States to USEC Inc. and also asked the administration to consider appointing a group known as Nuclear & Energy Security Partnerships as a second executive agent under the US-Russian highly-enriched uranium agreement. (Platt's Nuclear News Flashes, 10/30/01)
End to Avlis in Japan
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has decided to end research and development of laser uranium enrichment technology. The decision reflects uncertainty about the technology's applicability and economic feasibility. USEC stopped work on Avlis (Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation) in 1999, although it continues to invest in development of Silex (Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation) , a molecular laser isotope separation process. France has decided to end work on Avlis in 2003. (Kyodo News Service, Japan Economic Newswire, 10/2/01)
VII. DEPLETED URANIUM
DOE postponed the meetings on depleted uranium conversion scheduled for early November near the three gaseous diffusion plants.
(See October UEN.) It has moved the meeting at Oak Ridge to December 4 (Pollard Auditorium, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education), at Paducah to December 6 (Great Hall, Information Age Park Resource Center), and in the Portsmouth area to November 28 (Vern Riffe Vocational School, Piketon). The department has also extended the period for written comments. They should now be postmarked by January 11, 2002. (DOE Program Announcement, 10/31/01)