University Daily Kansan / Friday, May 4, 1990
15B
Nuclear reactors to restart
Weapons plants were closed in 1988 for safety
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Nuclear weapons reactors that were shut down for nearly two years because of safety and environmental concerns would be reactivated early next year according to a new Energy Department schedule.
Energy Secretary James Watkins, announcing the planned restart of three reactors at the Savannah River plant in South Carolina, said the department also was reviewing a proposal to build a plutonium warhead triggers at its Rocky Flats plant in Colorado.
"At this time, there does not seem to be any alternative for the nation other than keeping Rocky Flats on line to deal with warhead management." Watkins told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee Tuesday.
he said the department planned to restart its K reactor at the Savannah River plant in December and, after a period of low-power testing, would begin producing tritium for nuclear weapons in January.
waters and a river.
The P and L reactors at Savannah River would be restarted in March and September, 1991, respectively.
But Watkins expressed confidence that his department could now defeat any legal challenges, saying it would release draft environmental impact statements today on the remains of the Savannah River reactors.
with production of weapons components from each to resume a month after their start-up. Walkins said
All three reactors at Savannah River have been shut down since mid-1988, and operations at the Rocky Flats plant were suspended after an explosion brought the restocking of the nation's weapon stockpile to a halt.
surgery weapons were issued.
Watkins said the government had spent $7.5 billion in the past three
"A month ago, for the first time, I began to feel comfortable about Savannah River," he told the Strategic Forces and Nuclear Determination Subcommittee. "I hadn't felt
— Sen. James Exon subcommittee chairman
'I wish I could say we don't need any production of weapons material. That is not the case. The Soviet Union is going to be relying on its nuclear deterrent as a strategy more than ever before.'
years to modernize the Savannah River and Rocky Flats plants to bring them up to environmental and safety standards.
Environmentalists and antinuclear activists, particularly those living near the plants, called for a continued moratorium and have vowed to fight in court the reopening of the plants.
"Several unresolved issues relating to restart of the Savannah River reactors remain on the table. It's much too soon for Secretary Watkins to announce a restart schedule," said Brian Costner, director of the Energy Research Foundation of Columbia, S.C., an environmental group.
that way before. Everything has turned around down there."
airlines around the department and appointed outside experts have not yet completed their reviews and approved the schedule for resuming operations at Rocky Flats, Watkins said he anticipated making a formal announcement on it next month.
He also said he was looking at opening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to its first wastewater treatment plant, and we waited in October or November.
He said he envisioned only a "very modest amount of . . . wastes" moving to the New Mexico site initially, primarily to research its suitability
as a permanent burial ground for such wastes.
Despite lingering environmental concerns, senators at the hearing agreed that the United States could not afford to continue forestalling a resumption of weapons production.
"I wish I could say we don't need any production of weapons material,"副subcommittee Chairman Sen. James Exon, D-Neb."That is not the case. The Soviet Union is going to be relying on its nuclear deterrent as a strategy more than ever before."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, said the Soviets had 11 weapons production reactors in operation, including three for making plutonium, despite a "marginally greater" stockpile of plutonium than the United States.
"They have the capability to turn a switch on and make more. We don't," he said.
Watkins declined to discuss in detail the state of the nation's tritium stockpile other than to say it was deteriorating at a rate of 5.5 percent a year with the Savannah River reactors shut down.
"We're going through a very dramatic period now," he said before the hearing went behind closed doors for a classified briefing on the stockpile. "In the near term, we can meet the majority of our national security requirements."
Nuclear lab seeks to help environment
Solar power kills organic waste in contaminated water, breaks down toxic waste
The Associated Press
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The silver trough, as long as a football field, was developed to harness the sun and help wean the nation off imported oil. For years, it stood abandoned in the desert, an obsolete relic of the 1700s.
Now, in another time and another growing national crisis, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have dusted off their sophisticated solar panels and put them back to work.
This time, the panels are helping the environment. Sandia scientists think they have found an efficient way to use solar power to break down toxic waste, help clean up polluted dumps and cleanse contaminated water tables.
Dugan said, "We never did this before because nobody thought of it before. Some might say it's a breakthrough. I think of it as an engineering advancement."
"We're just helping nature, that's all. There's nothing artificial about this," said Virgil Dugan, Sandia's director of advanced energy technology.
Companies are lining up to learn more about Sandia's gadget, Dugan said. The laboratory plans to have a
though it seems there are two different applications," said Pat Eicker, manager of robotic science and technology at Sandia.
As the need for ever-improved nuclear weapons lessens, the laboratories are directing their technological might to greater peacetime use.
In the case of the abandoned solar collector, scientists realized they might be able to run contaminated water, such as polluted ground*
- Pat Eicker
Solar research is just one area where scientists at Sandia, one of the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories, are finding ways to help with growing environmental problems.
With expertise developed for weapons programs and Army machinery, "smart" robots are hurriedly being assembled to clean up the toxic chemical waste at Department of Energy weapons plants across the country.
"It's the same technology, even
'The use of models to simulate situations and the use of sensors to facilitate work on nuclear weapons production is what motivated this research. But this has far-reaching applications.'
Sandia National Laboratories manager of robotic science and technology
water, through the sunlight-focusing machine and use its power to help break down organic toxic waste.
break down organic
The contaminated water is mixed
with a catalyst, titanium dioxide,
and pumped through a clear tube in
the center of the long, parabolic solar
trough.
trooper. The tube glows like Darth Vader's sword as sunlight activates the titanium dioxide, which frees an electron. The electron grabs onto organic material, in this case the contaminates, and breaks them down into water, carbon dioxide and a mild, harmless acid.
harmful cells.
Until a full-scale experiment last June, scientists weren't sure if the solar machine would cause complete destruction of the pollutants. But it did.
"You can drink the water that comes out at the end," said Mike Prairie, a senior technical staff member on the solar project.
sanida has been testing the system with water contaminated by trichloroethylene, a common degreasing substance that contaminates ground water. Scientists believe the system will also work on PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, dyes, solvents and other organic, or carbon-based, materials.
trial system out in a year, and Dugan thinks the system is about four years away from commercial use.
Companies must now package their toxic waste and ship it to dump sites or incinerators. The solar system might be economical enough to allow even small firms to have on-site waste systems and also may be portable, Dugan said. It will likely be more efficient and cheaper than present ground water purification systems, he said.
The solar panels won't help with the problem of nuclear waste, however, because it is inorganic.
began eight years ago to find ways to use machines for the sometimes dangerous work of building nuclear and chemicalium and other hazard materials.
Already the lab has created a "smart" manufacturing system that will help automate some production in weapons plants. It has also designed wheeled robotic vehicles for the Army.
Work also is under way to create a system that can clean up toxic areas too dangerous for humans to venture into at Department of Energy weapons plants, such as Hanford, Wash.; Savannah River, Ga.; Oak Ridge, Teen.; Fernald, Ohio; and Pantex, Texas.
Scientists said a robotic backhoe would be used at highly radioactive and toxic pits. It will be used along with a 40-foot robotic arm with sight and radar capabilities that can scan a dump, map pipes, vacuum sand and dirt, lift and remove drums and clean leaking underground storage tanks.
"You've got to have some way to get in there and recover this stuff," Elicker said. "And it's so dangerous, people can't do it."
Sandia's robotics researchers
people because of the Department of Energy's rush to begin cleanups, Sandia researchers hastily built a one-tenth-scale model of a waste dump, along with a robotic arm.
"The use of models to simulate situations and the use of sensors to facilitate work on nuclear weapons production is what motivated this research," Eicker said. "But this has far-reaching applications."
Weapons labs work to adjust in time of peace
The Associated Press
offer.
Federal officials have declassified some technologies from secret status and pumped money into programs to find ways to use their know-how in U.S. industry.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An outbreak of peace has Sandia National Laboratories and its two top-secret weapons lab cousins rolling out the welcome mats to encourage private industry to see what breakthroughs they have to offer.
They call it technology transfer, and they see it as a way to maintain their vitality now that the nation is becoming more concerned about its economic competitiveness than its military might.
"This lab is dedicated to enhancing the prosperity, prosperity and well-being of the nation, so if the major concern now is economic security, it's safe to say this lab will be involved," said Gerald Yonas, director of laboratory development at Sandia, one of three top-secret government defense labs.
dense blobs.
The others are Los Alamos
National Laboratory at Los Alamos,
N.M., and Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory at Livermore, Calif.
Yonas, who was former President Reagan's first chief scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative, said Sandra did not have a "bunch of exciting widgets sitting on the shelf waiting to be dusted off."
What the lab does have is experience, research and development capabilities and talent that can be offered to commercial industries.
Electronics technology may be useful to semiconductor companies. Imaging technology, used to find hidden airplanes or mobile strategic targets, may be helpful to computer companies. A host of weapons systems could apply to medicine, from new ways to release medication to better diagnostic systems.
"We can put sensors in a weapon and know exactly what it's doing," Yonas said. "The question is, can we use that on a human being?"
And while Sandia's scientists know weapons, they do not know medicine. That's why they're inviting medical companies.
"There's a whole new class of medical applications, but the health-care field doesn't know we exist." Yonas said.
The walls began to come down after a defense authorization bill signed by President Bush in December modified the Atomic Energy Act to permit, and even encourage, the three Department of Energy labs to negotiate cooperative agreements directly with industries and universities.
"The bill explicitly states that technology transfer is a mission of DOE's defense programs," said Dan Arvizu, Sandi's technology transfer and policy department manager.
manager.
promoted earlier, federal legislation promoted technology transfer from NASA and other scientific endeavors but specifically excluded the three national weapons labs.
Everybody wanted to keep them under wraps because they were doing defense work," Yonas said.
Peace, the "P-word" as Sandia scientists joke, made the change possible.
"There was a lot of intense debate over whether this would dilute us from our defense mission," Yonas said. "But there was a lot of public discussion that economic competitiveness was a national issue, probably more so than the Soviet threat."
"And if you're not working on the nation's important problems, you're not going to attract the top people."
people. Sanda has $ 85 million this year, which will help with technology transfer, and has already identified 15 programs to target for industry. They include everything from developing a way for diabetes to measure their blood sugar without drawing blood to building a sophisticated thermal imaging security system that could be used to fight terrorism and drug smuggling.
But opening up also has required a change in attitude at the lab, where work was cloaked in secrecy for decades, and a change in attitude within industry, Arvizu said.
Although the government retains patent rights to inventions at the labs, the bill lets companies participating in research and development use innovations for five years before data is made available to the public and corporate competitors.
Yonas, who helped develop Sandia's fusion energy research program before working on Star Wars, says he has seen commercial applications for the technology all along but until now has not been able to pursue the idea aggressively.
Star Wars lasers, for example, could be used to efficiently sterilize medical supplies.
A alongside photos of Yonas with Reagan, Yonas has an old license plate from Virginia: SDI GUY. Now he drives a car; he is known for finding his present challenge just as exciting as the earlier ones.
"I've spent a lot of my life working on fusion and also on SDI and now on a new problem, economic competitiveness," Yonas
"But I think we're on the verge here of a new era of industrial applications," he said.
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