by Matthew L. Wald

WASHINGTON, June 25, 2003 The radiation doses that the Energy Department estimates for workers at a new plutonium factory that it wants to build would cause about one fatal case of cancer for each four and a half years the plant operates, according to the draft environmental impact statement.

The number could be larger or smaller depending on the production level. The design is for the plant to run for 40 years, implying a total of about nine fatal cancers.

The estimate is given on the fourth page of an eight-page table, in the third chapter of an 11-chapter first volume of the environmental impact statement for the plant, the Modern Pit Facility. The Energy Department is considering building the plant to make smaller nuclear bombs and bombs to replace old ones that it says may become unreliable.

The department is about a year from deciding whether to build the plant, a spokesman said.

The estimate was pointed out by Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a group that specializes in analyzing environmental and safety problems in producing nuclear weapons. Mr. Makhijani said it was "unconscionable to build such a risky and unneeded facility."

A spokesman for the Energy Department, Anson Franklin, said the calculation of nine deaths over 40 years was "a statistical contortion that should not obscure the fact that that's a very conservative standard for radiation exposure." The average annual dose to an individual worker would be about 10 percent of the limit used at civilian power reactors and other radiation environments, according to the report. Mr. Franklin said the number was not that far above natural background radiation that an average person would receive.

The department estimate states the risk several ways. It puts the annual risk of a single fatal cancer case at 22 percent, and it says the collective dose to the worker population would be 560 rem. A rem is a standard unit of radiation, and the Energy Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Administration and other agencies use a formula that predicts one cancer death for each 2,500 rem exposure to the population.

The narrative section of the environmental statement also predicts that a worker would have to have a 4,900-year career at the plant before developing cancer. The plant would employ 1,800 workers, of whom about 1,100 would be exposed to radiation. Hundreds would be expected to die of cancer no matter their occupations.

The Energy Department has not announced the site. But the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., is a leading candidate.

The department's weapons complex, parts of which date from the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to build the first nuclear bombs, has a legacy of pollution and disregard for workers' health. Nearly all its major plants were built before the era of environmental impact statements.

Early in 2000, the department acknowledged for the first time that workers had been made sick or died because of their occupational exposures. It said at the time that many of the worst abuses were committed in World War II and the cold war.

Opponents argue that the Modern Pit Facility would serve no useful purpose. The department has argued that plutonium, the material at the heart of nuclear bombs, deteriorates over time, and thus the hollow plutonium spheres at the heart of the bombs, the "pits," have to be replaced.

Mr. Makhijani said, "There isn't a weapon in the current arsenal that's ever had an aging reliability problem."

Other critics question developing smaller weapons. Some military strategists say they would be useful for destroying subterranean military factories or command bunkers. Other critics fear that it would make the United States more likely to cross the nuclear threshold and use weapons in war, opening the door for the wider use of nuclear bombs.

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