WASHINGTON - The absence of a government plan to consolidate weapons-grade plutonium is driving up storage and security costs at facilities including the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, experts said Friday.

The Department of Energy also lacks the capability to fully monitor the condition of the hazardous material to ensure continued safe storage, Gene Aloise, director of natural resources and environment for the Government Accountability Office, testified to a House Energy subcommittee.

Charles Anderson, assistant secretary of environmental management, said a plan for consolidation would be ready within two years. He acknowledged that failure to consolidate the 50 metric tons of plutonium no longer needed for nuclear weapons "would be a tremendous cost to the taxpayers."

The General Accountability Office, the investigative office of Congress, estimated in a July report that it would cost $85 million a year to continue storing plutonium at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington and that the goal of cleaning up that site, now scheduled to be completed by 2035, is in question.

When nuclear weapons production stopped in 1989, the DOE had plutonium inventories at Hanford, Rocky Flats in Colorado, Los Alamos in New Mexico, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.

Aloise noted that while the DOE has not made a final decision on consolidation, it has proceeded with plans to establish adequate capacity to store the material at SRS until it can be processed into a form for permanent disposition at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

Anderson said the department had no current plans to further consolidate plutonium at SRS and that the DOE will not move any plutonium until all requirements are met.

Aloise said another problem was that the DOE has relied on individual sites to develop their own plans. He said one-fifth of Hanford's plutonium is in the form of 12-foot-long nuclear fuel rods, while Savannah's storage plan assumed Hanford would package the material in DOE's standard storage containers, five inches by 10 inches.

According to Aloise, plutonium stabilization and packaging are completed at Rocky Flats, Hanford and Savannah, and Savannah has received nearly 1,900 containers from Rocky Flats. Once the operation is completed, the DOE will have nearly 5,700 storage containers that could eventually be shipped to SRS, he said.

Plutonium poses health and environmental hazards, and a terrorist attack on a facility with plutonium could have devastating consequences. The radioactive material also could be used by terrorists to create improvised nuclear devices or "dirty bombs."

---

On the NET:

GAO: http://www.gao.gov/

Department of Energy: http://www.doe.gov/