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Friday, August 19, 2005

Los Alamos Ships Plutonium Material to WIPP


Associated Press
      LOS ALAMOS — Los Alamos National Laboratory has shipped weapons-grade plutonium to the federal government's underground nuclear waste dump near Carlsbad.
    Fourteen steel drums of plutonium-239 left Los Alamos for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on July 28. It was the first permanent reduction in so-called sealed sources at Los Alamos in more than two years.
    Sealed sources can be any one of several radioactive isotopes encapsulated to prevent leakage. They are used for research and a variety of medical and industrial applications, and are found in such things as pacemakers, moisture gauges, oil-well logging equipment and smoke detectors.
    Only plutonium-239 sources from defense-related efforts can be buried at WIPP, which was excavated 2,150-feet underground in vast underground salt beds. The repository, which opened in March 1999, is meant for plutonium-contaminated material from the nation's defense work.
    Los Alamos began to gather sources of plutonium-239 from other places in 1979, when the first abandoned or unwanted sources began arriving.
    "Finally, we're beginning to dispose of the sources we have recovered,'' said Lee Leonard, project leader for the lab's offsite source recovery program.
    While there's a place to permanently store the material from defense work, "eventually, we will need a path for everything else,'' Leonard said.
    The lab had stored about 100 drums of plutonium-239 sources collected over the past couple of years. Collection has been stopped because Los Alamos is out of room.
    Used and unwanted sources of radioactive material have become a major national security concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
    Leonard said there's still plutonium-239 around the nation, most of it at universities that conducted physics experiments with the material.
    The lab needs to recover about 2,800 grams of plutonium from more than 100 sources around the country, he said. Additional sources are still being used but will have to be recovered eventually, he said.
    The Department of Energy has estimated it would take 4,000 grams of plutonium to make a small nuclear weapon, according to a resource page on weapons of mass destruction on a Web site of the Federation of American Scientists.