Opinion: Why Watts Bar Nuclear Plant has become a target

photo Watts Bar Nuclear Plant makes electricity, but it also is used to produce tritium, the form of hydrogen used in the hydrogen bomb.

"The government agency responsible for maintaining America's nuclear arsenal wants to continue to use a TVA nuclear power plant to produce bomb material even though tritium leaks from the process have been nearly four times what was originally projected."

That lead sentence in a Wednesday story in the Times Free Press made no sense until you read what that government agency is: the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Well, duh. The National Nuclear Security Administration has never seen anything nuclear that it didn't think was safe unless it was the mythical WMD supposedly in the hands of Saddam Hussein.

And, sure enough, Curtis Chambellan, the head of NNSA, thinks bomb-grade tritium has been safely produced at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant since 2003 -- despite the plume of tritium TVA is monitoring as it moves in groundwater from the Watts Bar reactors in Spring City, Tenn., toward the Tennessee River.

Most nuclear plants make electricity. But Watts Bar also is used to produce tritium, the form of hydrogen used in the hydrogen bomb. Nuclear experts initially predicted that no more than 1 curie from the approximately 10,000 curies in each tritium-producing burnable absorber rod would permeate through the wall of each rod into the reactor coolant water within Watts Bar. But here we are 11 years later and "irradiation experience" at the Tennessee Valley Authority plant has shown that the actual permeation rate was nearly 4 curies per rod each year.

Despite the higher-than-expected leakage rate, a new environmental assessment of the process found that the risk of even a single additional case of cancer was only one in 100,000 for plant workers and one in 2.5 million in the general public from the tritium production at Watts Bar, the head of NNSA said in a recent public hearing about Watts Bar.

But, of course, those are not the numbers driving this issue.

You know the old adage: Follow the money.

In 2010, TVA was arguing for tritium production at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant, too, (so far, it is only made at Watts Bar). But during a public hearing about Sequoyah, TVA officials said the utility had received $138 million from DOE to produce tritium at Watts Bar. And a DOE spokeswoman said the average annual costs for tritium production were forecast at $56 million per year in the White House fiscal 2011 budget.

At last week's public hearing about Watts Bar, it was stated that the military last year paid TVA $54 million to irradiate the tritium-producing rods, and the head of NNSA said the federal utility will continue to receive about half of the $80 million that the National Nuclear Security Administration spends each year to make tritium to keep its nuclear arsenal ready.

Our nuclear plants are the only two in the nation authorized to double as weapons-grade tritium producers.

That would seem to make quite the target.

Are you comfortable with that?

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