Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007150154
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Despite improving U.S.-Soviet relations and the prospect of deep cuts in superpower arsenals, the Department of Energy has based its research and spending plans on "a requirement for nuclear weapons as far as we can see," a senior department official said Saturday.
While the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is expected to decline from its current level of about 21,000 weapons over the next 60 years, department officials say they are anticipating a continued need to manufacture many new weapons with improved, safer designs that would replace those being retired or withdrawn as obsolete.
"Complex 21, my vision of a fully modernized [nuclear weapons] complex, is planned to be in operation about 2015 and to support the nation's strategic deterrent until the middle of the century," Energy Secretary James Watkins said in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee that provided the most detailed explanation yet of the department's long-term goals.
Watkins told the committee that under one option being considered, "Complex 21" - for the 21st century - may consist of one or two superbomb-building sites that would consolidate activities now spread across 12 states.
That would create what activists are calling "a nuclear weapons theme park," which some officials say could be operated in a state such as South Carolina where public support for the bomb-building enterprise and its attendant infusion of federal dollars remains high.
But after having officially scrapped a modernization plan prepared at the end of the Reagan administration, Watkins said he expects the final shape of "Complex 21" will not become clear until late 1993 or early 1994.
His timetable partly reflects a January decision under threat of a lawsuit to conduct a full-scale assessment of the environmental impacts of modernizing the vast nuclear weapons manufacturing complex. That decision requires extensive public hearings on options that also include upgrading all existing weapons facilities or relocating some of the most hazardous ones.
"Complex 21 will be designed to comply with all applicable environmental, safety and health requirements, and will efficiently manufacture nuclear weapons at a rate consistent with national security needs," Watkins told the committee.
The project's planned 25-year period of construction reflects what agency officials say is the massive scale of improvements needed after a decade of neglect. And while no formal cost estimates have been prepared, one agency official said that building "Complex 21" from existing facilities would require at least $15 billion. Roughly $55 million would be spent to manage this construction through fiscal 1993, climbing to $77 million in fiscal 1994, and to hundreds of millions of dollars annually thereafter.
Officials have said the cost of cleaning up the extensive environmental damage at nuclear weapons facilities is expected to be as much as 10 times greater than the cost of Complex 21, prompting some environmental and anti-nuclear activists to say the new production plans should have a much lower federal priority.
Bob Schaeffer, national spokesman for the Military Production Network that monitors environmental compliance at the weapons facilities, criticized Watkins's statement that existing facilities to be used until Complex 21 is ready will "comply as much as possible" with environmental and safety laws. Watkins has said repeatedly that compliance with such laws is his highest priority, ahead of weapons production.
Officials said the Energy Department has been using six different scenarios for future nuclear weapons requirements in their preliminary planning, beginning conservatively at the current level of 21,000 weapons and heading downward toward a "minimum" nuclear force of close to 3,000 weapons. The numbers are based on various classified assumptions about the types of nuclear weapons that will make up the U.S. arsenal through 2050.
"We're not going to require [a nuclear weapons enterprise] as large, as complex, and far flung as the one we have today," an official said. While emphasizing that no decisions have been made, he said consolidation of the existing 17 facilities at one or two sites would sharply cut the cost of transporting weapons materials, increase security and allow less-fettered operation in a "more hospitable" climate where citizens are "comfortable" with bomb-building.
"It would have to be [a site] where we have enough buffer land" to protect the populace from any accidents, said Rep. David E. Skaggs, D-Colo., whose district includes the Rocky Flats plant. Since Watkins has said the plutonium processing operations now carried out at Rocky Flats will not be transferred to a facility at Los Alamos, N.M., and that the future role of the Hanford, Wash., site is waste cleanup, not production, that would leave Savannah River, S.C., and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory as the most likely choices.
by CNB