Going nuclear: your utility company may soon be involved in making warheads.

Your check to the electric company might soon become a subsidy for nuclear weapons. Public-utility companies around the country are vying to produce tritium, a compound of three hydrogen molecules that intensifies the explosive force of thermonuclear warheads. This would pose environmental and safety risks. It would blur the distinction between commercial nuclear power and weapons production. And it would mock U.S. nonproliferation efforts.

The United States hasn't manufactured tritium since 1988 when a government-run plant in Savannah River, South Carolina, shut down for safety reasons. The gas has a short half-life -- about twelve-and-a-half years. According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. supply will be depleted by 2011.

So the Clinton Administration has ordered the Department of Energy to figure out how and where to produce tritium again.

In late 1995, then-energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced that the department would investigate two alternatives for tritium production: using a commercial nuclear reactor, or developing a linear accelerator.

Earlier this year, the department put its Fast Flux Test Facility, an experimental reactor at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, on "hot standby" as another possibility.

Already the Department of Energy has selected the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Spring City, Tennessee, to produce an ounce of tritium in an eighteen-month test run beginning this fall. The plant, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority, will become the first commercial reactor ever to produce tritium.

According to the Department of Energy, the intent of the test run is to win the confidence of the nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial plants. Watts Bar may or may not end up with a contract for long-term tritium production. The Department of Energy issues its final request for proposals this June, and interested utilities must respond by September. The department will choose a tritium producer next year.

Public utilities in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, among others, have already expressed interest in producing tritium for the Department of Energy.

"Technically, tritium production [at commercial power plants] doesn't seem to be a problem," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear-safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The process, called irradiation, is simple: Take neutrons generated by nuclear reactors and bombard lithium rods with them.

Stanley F Wozniak is the director of nuclear fuel for the Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, one of the interested utilities. "We already use glass rodlets, so for us to use lithium wouldn't be any different," he says. "We're not as familiar with lithium, but those are just technical problems that could be overcome with some type of test program. If the DOE can use these irradiated lithium rods, more power to them."

But there are environmental hazards. "Nobody should say nuclear reactors present no risks. There are certainly large quantities of nuclear waste from any tritium-production process," says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "Whenever you introduce new fuel arrangements, you change the reaction process.... That presents safety issues commercial nuclear-power plants should evaluate."

Aside from the safety issues, there are moral issues as well. Lochbaum, who is a nuclear engineer, says many of his colleagues made a conscious decision not to go to work for defense companies. They want to use their expertise for peaceful means. "Now using commercial reactors for bomb-making undermines ethical choices that people made in their lives," he says.

Wozniak acknowledges the criticism. "From the green side, people are opposed to doing anything with a commercial plant that's related to defense," he says. "I can understand their concern. I can also understand those who are on a path to phase out nuclear power. They don't want to see anything that makes commercial nuclear power look beneficial."

If the Department of Energy does end up contracting a commercial power plant to produce tritium, it will mark a major shift in policy.

"This is a flagrant example of losing separation between the civilian sector and military-nuclear activities," says Mary Olson, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. She warns it will lead to a "frighteningly powerful military-industrial-utility complex."

Olson sees tritium production as a cover for the weapons industry -- a way of making bombs an unavoidable part of civilian life. "It's really about the money and about a hard-core group of committed people who want to make sure that the twenty-first century has a nuclear component," she says.

"The industry is in dire straits," agrees Jim Riccio of Public Citizen. He authors the group's annual "Nuclear Lemons" report, which ranks the nation's worst nuclear power plants. "These guys are looking for anything to bail them out."

When it comes to commercial reactors producing warhead gas. it's not clear who's bailing out whom. Depending on how things go, the Department of Energy may pay a commercial power plant to produce tritium. That would help the utility, and the ratepayers' dollars would subsidize weapons production.

"It's a very bizarre situation," says Olson. "The [utility] ratepayer is propping up nuclear-weapons activity, and the taxpayer is shielding nuclear stockholders."

Olson has it all wrong, Wozniak says, because everyone pays for nukes one way or another. "If the DOE does not select a commercial plant, or a few, it will end up expending huge amounts of taxpayer money to build an accelerator to produce tritium. That seems to me to be a waste of money when we do have commercial facilities available," he says.

Bonnie Urfer of Nukewatch in Luck, Wisconsin, looks on the bright side. This is the first blatant intermingling of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. But the connection is not new, just more public." She's hoping the commercial production of tritium will make it easier to organize against nukes. Those who used to oppose nuclear power but defended weapons, or opposed weapons but defended power, will now see them as connected and protest both.

Though the Department of Energy selected Watts Bar for test production of tritium, it is still negotiating a fee with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Watts Bar is a new facility, the most recent nuclear reactor to go on-line. The $6.8 billion plant took twenty-three years to build and opened in 1996.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has a great incentive to work a deal with the Department of Energy, says Stephen Smith of the Tennessee Valley Energy Reform Coalition, which opposes the test run at Watts Bar. "TVA has problematic finances -- it's got $27.7 billion in debt, the largest utility debt in the United States. That's a large motivation," he points out.

The perceived urgent need for tritium has given hope to a number of beleaguered and nearly broke utilities. And it actually brought one reactor back to life: the Fast Flux Test Facility at Hanford. That reactor was scheduled to be decommissioned when Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary put it on "hot standby" as a possible tritium producer.

The Government Accountability Project vehemently opposes any plan to use the Hanford reactor. Tom Carpenter, director of the group's West Coast office in Seattle, obtained and publicized an Energy Department memo that suggests the reactor would be unsafe. "No engineer would propose a fast reactor to make tritium from lithium which is a thermal neutron absorber." says the memo, "and modifying a test reactor to the strength capacity as a production machine. . . . places the plant at risk."

William Kelly, the Department of Energy reactor engineer who wrote the memo, issued a statement April 1 saying his memo had been misinterpreted and that the Hanford reactor would not be unsafe.

According to Kelly, the most his memo said was that there were several areas where considerable work would need to be done to demonstrate that the safety parameters were maintained."

Carpenter says the memo included an in-depth analysis of problems. "The DOE tried to portray it all as speculative.... But this particular reactor was never designed as a production facility. It's a test facility for research. The memo says it would be unstable to run the reactor with the lithium targets necessary to produce tritium-ten times more unstable. In short, we stand by our interpretation. Nothing the DOE says refutes safety concerns."

Hanford doesn't need more trouble, Carpenter contends. "There's already enough waste there to fill a football field to 250 miles in the sky -- high enough that the space shuttle would bump into it. Hanford has been turned into a clean-up laboratory. Now the DOE would like to retool it into a Cold War machine. But wait a second: There's no Cold War."

That's the puzzling reality of renewing tritium production. Why put so much money and energy into maintaining a nuclear stockpile we should be getting rid of?

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START 1, went into effect in December 1994 and calls for a ceiling of about 6,000 nuclear warheads.

START Il calls for reducing the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia to about 3,500 warheads each. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and former President George Bush signed START 11 in 1993.

Through the Russian Parliament never ratified that treaty, at a summit in Helsinki in March, Yeltsin promised to help it along. Plus, he and President Clinton negotiated a new treaty, START III, that calls for reductions to somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 long-range nuclear warheads.

What's more, the Clinton Administration celebrated the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last summer. The idea behind the treaty is to make nuclear weapons unreliable and therefore too risky to use.

But the answer to the riddle is clear: The United States has no intention of ridding itself of nuclear weapons.

In his first term, President Clinton made his stance on nuclear weapons known: "I consider the maintenance of a safe and reliable nuclear-weapons stockpile to be of supreme national interest to the United States."

The U.S. production of tritium is hypocritical, says Jim Riccio. "We're telling other countries that they shouldn't use commercial plants to produce weapons-grade components," and now we're doing it ourselves, he adds.

As the Clinton Administration's tritium plans go forward, the arms race may only escalate.

"It is an indication that we do intend to continue to produce them into perpetuity," says Sam Day, an anti-nuclear activist and member of Nukewatch. "This is really a bad omen. If we do that, other nations are obviously going to do the same, and it doesn't take too many weapons to make a nasty situation."

A Deadly Recycling Scheme

The Department of Energy has a problem on its hands. It needs to dispose of fifty metric tons of plutonium, a highly radioactive element used in nuclear weapons. So Department bureaucrats have hatched a scheme to put all that nasty radioactive material to good use: Immobilize about one-third of it in a process called vitrification, convert the rest into mixed-oxide fuel, and burn it in commercial nuclear reactors. Many of the utilities that would like to produce tritium have also expressed interest in taking mixed-oxide fuel.

Jim Riccio of Public Citizen says the same hope that motivates public utilities to seek to produce tritium prompts them to take on deadly mixed-oxide fuel. "These guys are looking for a handout," he says.

"The industry is more desperate than it has ever, ever been," says Bonnie Urfer of Nukewatch in Luck, Wisconsin. "Burning mixed-oxide fuel is only one crazy recycling scheme. The possible consequences could be really severe if there's any failure."

Several of the utility reactors that have applied to take mixed-oxide fuel have turned up on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Watch List, and on Public Citizen's annual "Nuclear Lemons" list. Commonwealth Edison Company's LaSalle County Unit 1 reactor in Illinois is one. PECO Energy Company's Peach Bottom Unit 2 and 3 reactors in Pennsylvania have also been on both lists.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, says there are serious drawbacks to the Department of Energy's plans for mixed-oxide fuel. "It's not economical and requires heavy subsidies," he says. "These reactors were not designed to use plutonium fuel. There's a whole host of safety and licensing issues." The United States has had a policy against using weapons-grade plutonium in commercial plants, for fear that the material would fall into the hands of terrorists or black-marketeers.

The Clinton Administration has gone slack on that ban because it wants Russia, which still produces plutonium, to get rid of its supplies.

Makhijani argues that the United States pressure on Russia to burn mixed-oxide fuel does the world no favor. "The safety issues in Russia are more grave," he says. "Russia wasn't planning on using mixed-oxide fuel in light-water reactors. It was a Western proposal -- the first one, I'd say, that is in the direction of compromising safety in Russia. If there's an accident there. the consequences are unforeseeable for Western relations with Russia."

Aside from the safety issue, there's the proliferation. We're supposed to be reducing the threat of proliferation, but by going the mixed-oxide fuel route, we're laying the foundation for a plutonium economy in the future," says Makhijani.

A coalition of environmental, peace, and medical organizations -- including the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Greenpeace, and Physicians for Social Responsibility -- condemned the use of mixed-oxide fuel in reactors. In a January letter to President Clinton, the groups warned that the Energy Department's plans for mixed-oxide fuel could pump up international plutonium commerce, create more high-level radioactive waste, and hurt anti-proliferation efforts.

Even The Washington Post, in a December 1996 editorial. weighed in against the Energy Department's mixed-oxide fuel plans. But the Clinton Administration is proceeding.