(December 18, 1992) WE DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!SEQUOYAH FUELS CRIED UNCLE AND IS NOW CLOSED FOR GOOD. SOME FUNNY STUFF ABOUT CONTINUED OPERATIONS OF DEPLETED URANIUM FACILITY FOR 6 MORE MONTHS. WE ARE TIRED AND HAPPY AND GOING TO WORK ON DECOMMISSIONING...
Fax from Lance Hughes of Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE), 25 Nov. 1992
(384.3749) WISE Amsterdam - And they did! On 24 November 1992 General Atomics, owner of the Sequoyah Fuels uranium conversion facility near Gore, Oklahoma, USA, announced that it was closing the plant. The announcement ends years of struggle by NACE, the Cherokee Nation tribal government and local residents who had raised questions about the plant's management, its record of accidents (including one that killed a worker in 1986 and forced 130 people to seek medical treatment) and its role in contaminating the nearby Arkansas River and groundwater.
But, as Hughes' fax notes, the closing of the facility n which produced 20% of the world's supply of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) n doesn't mean an end to the struggle. After 22 years of operation, Sequoyah Fuels leaves a host of environmental problems and safety issues behind. "Now," Hughes told The New York Times in a telephone interview, "we have to make sure they are responsible for cleaning the mess up."
Already the state and federal governments have begun to negotiate with General Atomics about the extent of ecological damage caused by the plant and the cost of cleaning it up. General Atomics, a corporation privately held by the Blue brothers from Denver, Colorado, has put those costs at roughly US$5 million. But Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, says that figure is "absolutely" low. Other experts say the eventual price could be 10 to 100 times higher.
Oops: Someone in our Stockholm relay spotted an error in our lead article ("US U-Conversion Plant Ordered Shut Down") in this last NC and sent us the following: "There's a big boo boo in the material you took from The New York Times for your article on Sequoyah Fuels in the second paragraph on page two. The first two sentences in that paragraph are false. The first sentence describes fuel fabrication and the second sentence refers to enrichment. The Sequoyah facility does neither. It is a "uranium conversion plant" or "hex plant" that converts, in this case, U3O8 (yellowcake) to UF6 (for feed to enrichment plants) and converts depleted UF6 (produced at enrichment plants) to depleted UF4 (which is manufactured into depleted uranium metal components of weapons at special military facilities)." |
The Sequoyah Fuels plant was one of two privately owned US facilities that turned crushed uranium ore into a fine powder to be used for the manufacture of fuel rods for nuclear reactors. It also produced the prime ingredient for the dense uranium metal that is used to manufacture armor-piercing bullets and shells. The plant has been shut under order by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 17 November, when an accident released toxic gas and resulted in 34 people seeking medical attention.
According to General Atomics, the main reason it decided to close the plant was the increasing cost of complying with environmental regulations. The company's vice president and general counsel, James R. Edwards said the decline in the market for processed uranium contributed to the decision.
According to The New York Times, quoting US Department of Energy information, as utilities retire old nuclear reactors and consumers conserve more electricity, demand for new nuclear fuel rods is decreasing. In addition, the Pentagon recently announced that it had a 100-year supply of depleted uranium metal for armor-piercing shells. Nevertheless, Edwards said that though General Atomics would immediately halt production of uranium for fuel rods at Sequoyah, it hoped to complete its contracts for depleted uranium. This would mean that part of the plant could remain open until June.
[Editor's Note: As Hughes says, they have an enormous job ahead of them with the cleanup of a facility that he has elsewhere described as the death factory that it is. But judging by NACE's past campaigns, the fight is in very good hands. Their campaign to close the plant was, among other things, extremely creative. In addition to petitions consistently brought before the NRC, and monitoring and rigorous research, the group used tactics such as filing a complaint with the Oklahoma state Department of Human Services charging the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency with child abuse, as well as forged links with international groups from Saskatchewan, Canada to Kazakhastan. For more on these, see WISE NCs 374/375.3677 and 365.3588.]
Sources:
- The New York Times (US), 25 Nov. 1992, p.A14
- NACE (US)
Contact: NACE, PO Box 1671, Tahlequah OK 74465, USA; tel: +1-918-458-4322; fax: +1-918-458-0322.