Nuclear Policy

Robert Alvarez, a former DOE security adviser in the Clinton administration, noted that former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks was forced to resign in 2007 after an incident in which a contract worker was found to have removed classified documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“That site is storing one of the largest amounts of nuclear explosive material in the world,” Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the Energy Department, said in an interview. “It’s not rocket science to maintain and repair video cameras,” Mr. Alvarez noted.

“It’s supposed to be one of the world’s most secure facilities,” he said.

ROBERT ALVAREZ: The spent fuel pool in number four at Fukushima contains roughly ten times more caesium 137 than released by the Chernobyl accident.

"Once you get into Special Nuclear Material (plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium-235) everything becomes much more expensive in terms of cleanup and excavating," said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and former senior policy advisor to the Secretary of the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.

"The stuff is dangerous and you have to careful when digging it up," he said. "You also have to have all these additional expenses, safeguards, security, special reporting. The costs will go up astronomically."

The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements," Alvarez said in his response. "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cesium-137 released by the Chernobyl accident."

Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy and now a scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, endorsed the U.N. petition.

"The U.S. should be doing more to provide technical and materiel assistance, especially helping to provide more dry casks," Alvarez wrote in an email interview. "The U.S. Energy department has a considerable amount of experience for the past 20+ years and has been spending $6 billion/yr to stabilize and remediate the huge mess left behind from the nuclear arms race at dozens of sites in the U.S."

Dr. Robert Alvarez, a former top advisor at the US Department of Energy, confirmed the fears of Wyden and Gundersen when asked by Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumura to review the situation at Fukushima. Alvarez responded:

"The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cesium-137 released by the Chernobyl accident"

"It's a problem," said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the Energy Department, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Evidence from dual-use facilities, he said, can be mixed and leave too much room for interpretive spin.

"These inspectors must render an informed technical judgment in a loaded political environment," Mr. Alvarez said last week in an interview. "The competing pressures put them in a very difficult position."

Mr. Alvarez wrote... "The irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins pose far greater dangers than the molten cores. This is why: Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl."

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the nuclear accident called this pool "the weakest link" at Fukushima. Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser at the US department of energy said: "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain it could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident."