News article: Nuclear secrets buried in open sight
The danger of Alaska’s nuclear legacy
By: Robert Howk
Dateline: Downtown Anchorage
When most people think of Alaska, images of pristine scenery and wildlife probably come to mind--not nuclear waste, radiation poisoning of Natives and construction workers, or the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated in North America.
Yet to this day U.S. military, federal, state and local officials are handling a stockpile of issues dating to the 1950’s involving nuclear materials--hazardous waste clean-up, mothballing of obsolete facilities, and development of new sources of power and security in an era of global terrorism.
Split decisions: Nuclear power in the Far North
When a first class stamp cost four cents, John Glenn had just become the first American to orbit the earth; the Cuban missile crisis brought us closer to war; and U.S. Army engineers were quietly revving up the first and only nuclear reactor in Alaska.
From 1962 until it was shut down in 1973 the army’s experimental reactor at Ft. Greely, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks, cranked out electricity, steam heat and, critics say, weapons-grade plutonium and radioactive pollution.
And the army is still making decisions on what to do with the contaminated leftovers buried deep within a concrete and gravel sarcophagus at the former reactor site. “There are still a lot of little half-lives in there,” U.S. Army Alaska spokesman Chuck Canturbury said last month.
The reactor, called an SM-1A, was built to evaluate the use of nuclear power generation under adverse weather and geographic conditions. It was a 20-megawatt reactor capable of producing more than 1,600 kilowatts of power, plus steam for base heating and laundry services.
It has been in what the Army Corps of Engineers calls “safe-store condition” since the mid-1970’s, as explained in a 2001 article by Richard Wright, a radiation protection staff officer in the Safety and Occupational Health Office with the corps.
“Essentially this means that after final shutdown, the nuclear fuel and control rods were removed from each reactor and returned to the Department of Energy for disposition,” he wrote. “Other structural materials that were radiological contaminated, and minor primary reactor system components were cut up, and placed in the reactor vessel, which was filled with gravel or concrete, and sealed.
“Initially, it was decided that safe-store condition would be the safest and most cost-efficient mechanism to maintain the reactors until radiation in the entombed reactor vessel[s] decayed to low levels, when final decommissioning could occur safely, which could take about 50 years,” Wright noted. “Low-level contamination of soils around a waste discharge pipeline was detected during a recent base closure and realignment action. The contaminated soil has been removed and is awaiting transport to a disposal facility,” he concluded.
Canturbury said there are no immediate plans to remove the remaining reactor material at the site, but a series of meetings involving several agencies will likely occur in the not too distant future to determine the ultimate fate of the reactor site.
The past still bothers Alaska Community Action on Toxics executive director Pam Miller. She contends the military has been covering up years of contamination and cold-war intrigue.
“Our report indicates, and we believe, that … not only did the army take the radioactive waste and dump that directly into the groundwater, and bury a lot of it,” Miller said, “but we also believe there was a secret mission about it, that it wasn’t just to generate power, but it was there to create weapons-grade plutonium.”
Miller said her claims are based on documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, and visits to Ft. Greely and surrounding areas.
“We actually went out and did measurements, and found the type of radioactive isotopes that you find not necessarily around a power generator, but those around a weapons-grade facility,” she said
Army officials have disputed the pollution charges in the past, and Canturbury said he could provide no specific information regarding any plutonium production at the site.
“I know we’ve been a leader for the past thirty years” in environmental clean-up efforts, he said. “You go into the motor pool nowadays, there’s not even a drop of oil on the floor.”
Ft. Greely itself was scheduled to be closed several years ago, but those plans were reversed when the Bush administration tapped the fort to be Alaska’s home for the military’s Ground Based Mid-Course missile defense system.
Beer keg-sized radioactive generators
About 170 miles north of Fairbanks, the U.S. Air Force stands guard over a cluster of relatively small radioactive generators, while officials review ways to remove the devices to assuage concerns of nearby residents.
The units are called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, and they are in storage at a site known as Burnt Mountain. That’s about 50 miles from the native villages of Venetie and Arctic Village on a 108-acre military site within the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
“It’s the northernmost (military) seismic facility in Alaska, and the one facility of seven in Alaska that had used RTGs,” said Captain Brad Jessmer, chief of public relations at Eielson Air Force Base.
The ten devices were replaced with diesel generators in the 1990’s after objections were raised during public meetings with villagers and other opponents.
The generators were powered by a small mass of radioactive strontium-90. As the radioactivity in the substance decayed, the waste heat was captured and converted to electricity to power the seismic sensor equipment, Jessmer explained.
The strontium core is “about the size of a softball,” and the container is “about the size of a beer keg,” he estimated.
“There is no concern” about environmental hazards from the units, he said.
“They are very well protected, and the chance of any leakage is extremely unlikely. They are encased in such a manner that they are impregnable. There is no way that you could worry about damage releasing any strontium-90,” he added.
“Removing them has been kind of a challenge,” Jessmer acknowledged.
“The issue right now is trying to find a way to transport them out of here. The Canadians won’t let us transport them over their land,” he said. “But I can assure you that since they are not being used, the Air Force is looking into moving them from the site and putting them somewhere else in storage.”
A new nuke along the Yukon?
Marvin Yoder has been doing a lot of explaining lately.
City manager of Galena, a small town of about 700 souls along the Yukon River 300 miles northwest of Anchorage, Yoder and city council members are spearheading a plan to power the place with plutonium.
Or uranium.
They are looking at an underground, 10-megawatt nuclear reactor being developed by Toshiba Corporation in Japan.
“We already went through a feasibility study, and we got some money for environmental studies,” Yoder said in a telephone interview, citing a $500,000 grant from the Alaska legislature.
Now the questions are piling up about security, containment of the vessel, and cost-to-benefit ratios.
Galena, as most other rural communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River drainages, imports its yearly supply of diesel fuel at high cost via river barge each year.
Electricity costs in rural Alaska are exorbitant-more than three and a half times the national average per kilowatt hour-and Yoder said it is in the long-term interest of his community to explore the nuclear option.
“We’re moving ahead with this. We’ll see what happens.”
Compared with other small-scale nuclear power plants in America, the Galena proposal is fairly miniscule. For example, it would be about one-fortieth of the size production facilities such as the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant in Omaha, Nebraska, at 470 megawatts.
Regardless, the idea has raised concerns from groups including the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council and the non-profit Reactor Watchdog Project, based in Washington, D.C.
Security matters
“If there is a privately run, or state run (nuclear) facility, there are some very strict rules on whether the active duty military would even be able to go to protect any of those locations,” said Major James Law, Director of Public Affairs at Elmendorf Air Force Base, “because of the Posse Comitatus Act and the fact that the military cannot be used for law enforcement purposes in the United States.”
That leaves a lot to ponder for Major General Craig Campbell, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs and adjutant for general of the Alaska National Guard.
Campbell said the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management coordinates with different agencies, depending on the skills needed and the type of specific emergency.
“If you’re talking biomedical, the Department of Health and Human Services (has) the standards and they work with the medical community on control of the hazardous wastes that come out of medical facilities,” Campbell said.
“As you know, there is occasionally nuclear material that transports through Alaska. We know when it’s coming and where it is going and when it’s here,” he pointed out.
“We’ve got, pretty much, plans for about anything you can predict. I sleep well at night.”
Contact Robert Howk at .