Guest Column: Full disclosure needed for Advanced Test Reactor

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

By Mary Woollen

In a guest column that appeared in last week’s Planet, entitled “Another Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Steve Laflin chastises Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free for supposedly failing to inform the public of the benefits provided by the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR), a 40-year-old nuclear reactor located at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Mr. Laflin maintains, “I don’t recall KYNF informing anyone about the fact that the ATR is the sole source of cobalt for the U.S.” He then claims, “Shutting down the ATR would leave thousands without cobalt for medical treatment … .”

Cobalt 57 and cobalt 60 are radioactive isotopes used in certain medical applications. They just happen to be produced, at the ATR, by International Isotopes, Inc. of which Mr. Laflin is the CEO. Thus, Mr. Laflin has an obvious financial interest in keeping the ATR running.

More important, these isotopes are also produced in Canada and the U.K. and are shipped to the United States by Mr. Laflin’s competitor, MDS Nordion. MDS Nordion and other producers could increase their production and export to the United States if the market so demanded.

Furthermore, the ATR is not the only U.S. facility capable of producing cobalt and other medical isotopes. As just one example, the High Flux Test Reactor in South Carolina is another DOE-owned reactor that could readily be used to produce these isotopes.
Mr. Laflin claims that a shutdown of the ATR will deprive cancer patients of medicine. That is simply not the case. It would, however, prevent his company from making money at the ATR while risking the health and safety of the people of southeastern Idaho and Wyoming.

Ironically, while criticizing KYNF for not delivering the “facts” about the ATR, Mr. Laflin charges that KYNF is misguided in its demand that the United States Department of Energy conduct a public review of the environmental impacts of operating the ATR for another 35 years, as it is required to do by the National Environmental Policy Act.
Mr. Laflin asserts, “There is some amount of risk to everything we do in life, and provided enough information we are usually wise enough to decide which risks we are willing to accept, and which we are not. In order to make that kind of decision, however, we need to deal with all the facts.”

Precisely, Mr. Laflin! That is what KYNF is attempting to do through its two current lawsuits. In order to obtain the facts, we have first filed a Freedom of Information Act suit in order to get basic safety information about the reactor that has been withheld by the DOE, and second, we have demanded an environmental impact review so that the public can be informed about the risks as well as the benefits of continuing to run the ATR for another 35 years, as the DOE intends. Our goal is to let the public process prevail and for decisions to be made only after there is full disclosure.

We all know and accept that we take certain risks in our own private lives, but when it comes to the public trust there are mechanisms in place that dictate that our government fully inform us prior to deciding those risks that are acceptable, and those that are not.

KYNF will continue in its mission to attain the facts in order to inform the public discussion without a personal or financial agenda, or vested interest other than protecting public health and safety.

PERMALINK:
Guest Column: Full disclosure needed for Advanced Test Reactor | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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