Group airs concern over MOX

Watchdogs say safety systems meant to be used with reactor fuel pose significant risks

Web posted October 20, 2000

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By Brandon Haddockand Tom Corwin
Staff Writers

A controversial, multimillion-dollar project slated for Savannah River Site faces a new challenge.

A watchdog group held a news conference Thursday to raise concerns about the use of mixed-oxide, or MOX, reactor fuel in two nuclear-power plants near Charlotte, N.C. SRS is expected to produce the fuel in a $400 million plant to open by 2007.

Duke Power has offered to burn MOX fuel in four reactors at its Catawba and McGuire plants. But the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute has new concerns about the use of those plants after a federal report that questions the ``ice-condenser'' safety systems that the reactors would rely on to contain a nuclear accident.

``We are not an anti-nuclear organization,'' said the institute's executive director, Tom Clements, during a telephone interview Tuesday. ``These were just the wrong reactors to choose because of these safety problems.''

The institute's concerns stem from a report issued in May by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The federal agency stated that ice condensers could fail to contain a severe nuclear accident if power is lost to the systems.

The NRC had reviewed earlier the design of those systems and signed off on them as safe, Duke Power spokesman Tom Shiel said.

``We felt them to be safe, otherwise we wouldn't have built them,'' he said. The current NRC concerns are based on ``old data,'' Mr. Shiel said.

Watchdog groups had raised concerns about the use of MOX fuel, which, unlike typical reactor fuels, contains weapons-grade plutonium.

A 1999 Nuclear Control Institute report stated that the Energy Department underestimated the number of cancer deaths that would occur because of a catastrophic nuclear accident at a MOX-fuel reactor.

The Energy Department disagreed, in part, it said, because the report assumed the worst-case, and most unlikely, scenario for a nuclear accident - the failure of a reactor's ``containment dome,'' the shield between the reactor and the environment.

But an ice-condenser failure could result in such an event, watchdogs said.

``These things are very strange beasts, and we feel that these are definitely inferior containments,'' Mr. Clements said of ice condensers. ``It's foolish to be using MOX in these reactors because of the additional safety risks that MOX brings.''

But that's a smokescreen, Mr. Shiel said.

``They're using this particular finding as a hook to once again oppose the use of MOX fuel,'' he said. Nonetheless, there will be ``a lot of research and a lot of study'' in the years leading up to the actual use of MOX in the reactors, Mr. Shiel said.

Watchdogs plan to ask the Energy Department to amend its three-volume, 8-inch-thick ``environmental impact statement'' on the MOX program, Mr. Clements said, so that the report accounts for the use of ice condensers in the proposed reactors. The report took three years to complete.

The MOX plan is a cornerstone of the nation's $1.4 billion effort to rid itself of 55 tons of surplus plutonium, in order to ensure that the dangerous radioactive metal is never again used in weapons.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213, or Brandon Haddock at (706) 823-3409.

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