Twenty-two public interest groups, many of them in South Carolina and Georgia, signed a letter sent to the Department of Energy on Tuesday requesting a nonproliferation, safety assessment on German fuel that might be shipped to the Savannah River Site.
The move was spearheaded by SRS Watch, according to a press release.
SRS Watch Director Tom Clements sent the letter to DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz and Frank Klotz, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The letter requests that an assessment be prepared by DOE concerning a new reprocessing technique being developed by the Savannah River National Laboratory, or SRNL.
The nation has not decided whether SRS will be the landing place for the German fuel.
If accepted, the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, would come to SRS in the form of 1 million graphite spheres - each about the size of a tennis ball - containing highly enriched uranium from German research reactors.
Once at SRS, DOE would install in H Canyon a system capable of chemically removing the graphite from the fuel kernels using a technology being developed by SRNL.
The issue falls under the Atoms for Peace Program initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to make highly enriched uranium available to all countries who wanted it for research. Part of the agreement is for the U.S. to take the material back once research was completed.
Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament, or Georgia WAND, is one of the 22 groups that signed the letter.
Becky Rafter, executive director, said SRS should not be entering into new contracts to accept new materials.
"We're trying really hard to keep people from thinking of SRS as a geologic repository," Rafter said.
"We want any finances going to the site to go toward cleanup."
Another group, Conservation Voters of South Carolina, signed the letter.
Program director Alan Hancock said the environmental risks have to be taken into account.
"We really wanted to tell DOE that we were concerned with the proliferation risks with shipping the material to the port of Charleston, putting it in a train and shipping it to SRS," Hancock said. "We want to ensure that the (President Barack Obama) administration takes those risks into account."
DOE is preparing an environmental assessment on environmental aspects of the spent fuel import proposal. Once an assessment is released, a 45-day comment period and public meeting is expected to follow, which will allow residents an opportunity to express their opinions.
In the letter to DOE, Clements wrote, " ... it is imperative that DOE immediately prepare a publicly available nuclear nonproliferation impact assessment on the reprocessing of the German graphite spent fuel and that the public be allowed to have input into the preparation of that document."
Derrek Asberry is the SRS beat reporter.