PORTLAND, OREGON--After displaying more lives than a cat, the Fast Flux Test Facility, a nuclear research reactor in Hanford, Washington, has finally run out of luck. A federal appeals court in San Francisco last week denied a local group's bid to keep the Department of Energy reactor on standby for possible conversion to a for-profit producer of medical radioactive isotopes.
The research reactor went online in 1980 but was shut down just 12 years later because of high operating costs. The government has since spent about $35 million a year to keep the reactor idle while searching for possible new missions, such as producing tritium for nuclear weapons and radioisotopes for spacecraft batteries. Those hopes came to an end this week, as workers began draining molten sodium coolant from the reactor's core. Once drained, the reactor "would be extremely hard to restart," says Michael Turner of Fluor Hanford, the company doing the work. The shutdown could take 10 years and cost more than $600 million.
