Groups that have worked for years to see the waste contained and the Columbia River protected say that the government should not restart a facility that will add two metric tons of nuclear waste to the old reactor fuel rods already decaying in open pools only 1,000 feet from the river. The government claims that the facility could also be used for the production of medical isotopes, but a number of doctors and experts have written Secretary Pe a to say that the need for radioactive isotopes is overstated. An Energy Department spokesman admitted that the DOE's interest in restarting the FFTP is primarily for the production of tritium for the nuclear weapons program. Organizations representing over 8.5 million environmentalists, taxpayers and deficit hawks have joined to recommend the cutting of 71 programs that waste taxpayer dollars and threaten the environment. The Green Scissors campaign has already successfully recommended cuts of over 20 billion dollars in wasteful and environmentally harmful federal programs.
Pits are the cores of nuclear weapons and act as triggers for their detonation.
Current pit production capacity at LANL is 20 pits per year, and the project would increase this to 50 to 80 pits annually by the year 2005. These pits would be in addition to the 10,000 pits in storage, and an estimated 12,000 already in the current nuclear weapons stockpile. Opponents of the project maintain that new pit production is unnecessary to maintain all the weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Many of the 10,000 spare pits in bunkers near Amarillo, Texas, could be substituted in currently deployed weapons, if needed. There are also several thousand pits in nuclear weapons that are being held in reserve.