It isn’t often that I am called upon to write about a bunch of citizens fighting their government to keep something that doesn’t exist, but you know what they say, stuff happens.

I knew Benton County Commissioner Claude Oliver in the late 1970s when he was a state representative, and ran across him the other day in Chelan where we were attending different functions.

He wanted to talk about isotopes in general and Hanford’s Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) in particular, which he would like to be used to produce them except that it no longer exists.

Well, actually, it’s still in the same place in Richland, but on paper, as far as the feds are concerned, it isn’t there any more.

When Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Sept. 18, 2002, authorized the decommissioning of the FFTF, “The FFTF by U.S. Department of Energy standards no longer exists on the face of the earth for any consideration,” Oliver said.

What happened was that when President Bush’s team launched his new national energy policy, calling for the revival of nuclear energy, Hanford’s FFTF fell through the cracks. I.e., the Energy Department couldn’t find any “mission” for it. The Energy Department had decided to no longer subsidize production of isotopes. Goodbye, FFTF.

Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, dashed off a letter to Secretary Abraham asking him to reconsider the FFTF shutdown.

Demand for medical isotopes, which are used in medical research, diagnosis and treatment, may exceed the supply in the near future, he said. It’s bad enough 90 percent of those used in the U.S. are imported from abroad, from Canada, Europe and South Africa. We need to reduce our dependence on foreign suppliers over whom we have no control.

That got no results. Nor did letters from various officials to the state’s U.S. senators and governor asking for support in retaining the FFTF. Benton, Franklin and Yakima commissioners even wrote the president asking him to keep it open. Federal plans call for development of a sodium-cooled fast reactor and construction of six advanced nuclear reactors, when they could use the one they have for testing materials and fuels needed for the next generation of reactors.

Shutdown preparations have continued, along with disposal of nuclear waste. Draining of the sodium from the FFTF pipelines, which is about the same as cutting your wrists, was delayed from last November until this spring by a lawsuit filed by the locals, but has been done on the secondary system. Empty pipelines will corrode within six months so a restart within that time is vital.

Latest move is challenging the decommissioning as not proper because an environmental impact statement has not yet been prepared. The locals are anxious to be heard in the public comment part of the EIS in hopes of persuading Energy to change its mind.

So what’s the other side of this? Well, I’m told by others that the folks at Energy are so angry over lawsuits and other tactics delaying their intent to kill the FFTF that they not only hate the FFTF but Hanford as well. Hanford is blacklisted as far as any other Energy investments except to clean up the mess from defense production and get the hell out of town.

Hanford has a tremendous potential for any number of things, what with its superb transportation systems, the river, the highways, the railroads, the airports, and there’s a company that wants to privately produce isotopes at the FFTF but can’t get a deal. The people required to make the deal are the same ones frustrated in their effort to close the FFTF.

There has been so much ill will created over the fight to keep the FFTF going that Energy will do anything in its power to get it closed down. The irony is that while they’re having $5 billion in existing assets destroyed, they are asking Congress for billions to replace what they are destroying.

(Editor’s Note: Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA., 98340.).