The State - News from April 21, 1989

Two environmental groups told Energy Secretary James D. Watkins that they would sue his department if it did not order a formal assessment of the environmental and public health risks posed by a new plutonium processing plant in the San Francisco area. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Western States Legal Foundation said the proposed plant at the department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is intended to demonstrate a new plutonium processing technology for use at the department’s proposed Special Isotope Separation plant in Idaho, where fuel-grade plutonium would be converted into weapons-grade plutonium. A spokesman for the defense council said it is “reckless” to think an environmental impact statement “is not needed for a facility which vaporizes sizable quantities of plutonium--a potent cancer-causing substance--in a highly populated area subject to earthquakes.”