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Study Faults Y-12 Uranium Storage Methods
Large amounts of highly enriched uranium at the Y-12 facility in The study finds that the stored uranium poses both environmental and worker safety risks and urges the U.S. Energy Department to impose more rigorous oversight and to dispose of some of dangerous material as low-level nuclear waste. “A large fraction of HEU, which accumulated at the Y-12 site for more than 50 years, is still in insecure and unstable forms — posing increased environmental, safety and health risks,” says the report, written by former Energy Department policy adviser Robert Alvarez. He is now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, and the study is scheduled to be published in an upcoming issue of Science and Global Security. “Between 1993 and 2005, more than 40 percent of the total collective dose to workers from internal depositions of radioactive materials in the DOE complex (nationwide) occurred at the Y-12 site,” the study says, citing 23 fires and explosions over the past 15 years. An Energy Department official said Alvarez’s findings were “based on old reports that are woefully out of date.” “We agree with Mr. Alvarez that Y-12 had been allowed to deteriorate during the 1990s, but he appears to ignore a major campaign this administration undertook, beginning in 2001, to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrading the facilities and clearing out old, dilapidated structures and to improve security,” said Anson Franklin, a spokesman from the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (see GSN, March 30; Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, Oct. 24).
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