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

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: Includes related article on plans to recycle mixed-oxide fuel

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...