|
Alum Profile
|
|
 |
||
|
Why Tom Gosnell was selected to be part of a technical negotiating team working on arms control probably owes as much to his genial, down-to-earth manner as it does to his expertise with plutonium and other hazardous substances. You immediately trust the man. And trust, in his line of work, is absolutely essential. A radiation physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has spent the last several years advising government policy wonks on various scientific aspects of nuclear treaty verification, Gosnell is on the move all the time, meeting regularly with scientists from the former Soviet Union to devise procedures by which both governments-theirs and ours-can gradually de-nuke their vast weapons arsenals to meet reduction quotas specified by the START treaties and, less formally, achieve "transparency" with regard to each other's technology. It's work that has taken him to Russia eight times in the last four years and led to work sessions with Russian scientists on American turf. I met with Gosnell one morning in early May. I drove out Tesla Road in Livermore, where wineries alternated with horse pastures among the low hills, and a band of sun-struck cumulus hung near the horizon, remnant of a pre-dawn rain. Then I turned left, and the bland and boxy architecture of "the lab," as it's called, came into view. Some 8,000 people are employed there, but the place seemed strangely barren. I made my way to Building 219, a khaki-colored barracks now housing public relations personnel. One of the oldest buildings on the site, 219 is a throw-back to the era of Sputnik, duck-and-cover exercises, and flickering footage of bombs exploding in the Nevada desert. All told, the lab occupies a square mile of countryside, and, though some of the more modern structures have been landscaped, the anonymous look of the complex as a whole seems at odds with Livermore's undulant geography. It wasn't until Gosnell appeared in casual slacks and a chamois shirt that I realized I was expecting someone in a lab coat. He has the look of a man who would be as comfortable hiking the back trails of Northern California as examining barrels of plutonium at Rocky Flats. Perhaps that has something to do with his Chico background. Not only was he born and raised in Chico, he is a third-generation Chicoan who enjoys the distinction of being a graduate of the last eighth grade at Aymer J. Hamilton Elementary School and the first ninth grade at Chico Junior High. Though the lab was constructed in 1952 by the U.S. government for research on nuclear energy and weapons development, today it also houses, among other things, a biomedical program, a fusion energy program, the human genome project, and a nuclear non-proliferation program. "Almost everything at this lab is a spin-off from the nuclear weapons program," Gosnell said as he ran down a list of projects he's been involved with-research, health physics, counter-terrorism, and arms reduction, which was the focus of our conversation. "I never expected to get much into the arms control business. I thought it would be the guys who developed the weapons who would be called upon to provide technical assistance to the government." It turned out, though, that his background made him a good fit. After CSU, Chico, where he took his first course in nuclear physics, followed by a brief stint at the University of Nevada, he was hired by a commercial analytical laboratory in Richmond, California, that performed radio-chemical analyses of government and commercial samples, which included plutonium. "I worked there for five or six years, became a group leader, and was head of the radiation detection unit," Gosnell said. At the same time he was working on an engineering degree at UC, Berkeley. "Then I quit my job and was a student full time for about three years until I finished up my master's. And then I came here." That was twenty years ago. He commutes to the lab from Moraga, where he lives, he said, "in darkest suburbia" with his wife, Judy (Parker) Gosnell (B.S., Life Sciences, '65), and-at last count-two dogs, three cats, some chickens, and a rabbit. Daughter Analiesa was a state and national youth leader in the 4-H Youth Development Program, he explained. Now that she's a first-year student at Cal Poly, he added, the sheep she also used to raise "are blessedly absent."As he discussed the collaboration now occurring between the scientists of two previously antagonistic nations, Gosnell paused often to explain pieces of this historic shift in consciousness. "There are two START treaties, neither of which I had anything to do with," he cracked. "The first one took nine years from beginning negotiations to entering enforcement; the second has never been ratified by the Russian Duma. Since the first treaty didn't get ratified until they started negotiating the second, the hope is that since President Clinton has now brought up START III, maybe START II can get ratified." If that's how the process works, maybe Clinton should propose START IV. According to the Journal of the Federation of American Scientists, START III, by imposing a limit of 1,000 strategic nuclear warheads for each of the two countries (instead of the 3,500 weapons permitted for each side under START II), could save "$16 billion for the Defense Department and another $6 billion for the Department of Energy by the year 2010." Furthermore, the Journal continues, "at this level, both sides would be forced to single-warheaded missiles, and concerns about first-strike threats would finally disappear-something of real interest to the Duma." Apparently, though, interest has not translated into ratification. Russian recalcitrance at the diplomatic level has not prevented scientists of both nations from trying to ensure that future agreements and treaties hammered out by their bosses include solid technical underpinnings. The work might not be as glamorous, perhaps, as meeting with heads of state, but, from a safety standpoint, it is no less important. "Over the last four or so years," Gosnell said, "both the Russians and the Americans have claimed unilaterally that they're dismantling many of their nuclear weapons, a substantial fraction, and it was decided at a summit between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin that it would be nice to establish some openness so that we could both see that it was happening. This was called 'transparency' in arms control jargon. The arms controllers differentiate between transparency and verification," he explained. "Verification happens with a treaty, but, since treaties are so hard to negotiate and get ratified, the hope is that transparency measures will be easier to achieve." In order to facilitate transparency, in 1994, then-U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary and Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Viktor Mikhailov agreed that visits by scientific teams from both nations of facilities containing plutonium removed from nuclear weapons would help ensure that it was being stored, not reused in new weapons. As reasonable as this sounds, the strategy was somewhat tricky to implement. Said Gosnell, "The question was, how could you inspect the storage container without opening it to determine that not only was there weapons-grade plutonium inside, but that it came from nuclear weapons? And so people like me and my counterparts from Los Alamos thought about ways that you might do that using radiation detection. The problem with that was, the data themselves are classified." Therein lay the rub, claimed Gosnell. How to do measurements that produced classified raw data without compromising national security during inspection? "In fact, the Atomic Energy Act was amended in '94-'95 to allow some very limited sharing [of data] for arms control purposes. We came up with some ideas, and our counterparts in the Russian delegation came up with some ideas. And then we devised some candidate techniques that might be considered for joint experiments here, on two occasions, using unclassified pieces of plutonium in storage containers. Since they were unclassified, you could open the storage containers and pull them out so people could look at them." When some of the finer technical points had been resolved, the first Russian delegation arrived at Rocky Flats in Colorado. Gosnell hosted two later familiarization visits at the lab; meanwhile, the American team visited, among other sites, the Russian Tomsk-7 plant in Seversk, the largest nuclear facility in the world. That the two countries are willing to engage in reciprocal visits does not yield a simple tit-for-tat equation, technologically speaking. Far from it. While breeder reactors in this country (such as the ones at Hanford and Savannah River, whose sole function was the production of plutonium) have been shut down, some of those in Russia, including the one at Seversk, also produce energy for heating. That particular reactor, Gosnell pointed out, "supplies Tomsk, a city of 500,000, with a third of the steam necessary to heat the buildings there." So, what to do? "The U.S. government has, just this year, signed a bilateral agreement with the Russian Federation. It is called the Plutonium Production Reactor Agreement and covers, I believe, their production of weapons-grade plutonium from 1993 or 1995 and beyond. This plutonium will be placed in monitored storage." To help cover expenses, the U.S. has given Russia some $260 million for construction of storage facilities, a small amount when compared to the cost of letting the substance fall into the wrong hands. Destabilization of the former Soviet Union makes smuggling a real concern. So does the cost of making the stuff. "Producing plutonium is very expensive since it doesn't exist anymore naturally on the surface of the earth," Gosnell said. "It all decayed away. We presume it was there when the earth was formed, but it has a short half-life, comparatively speaking, of 25,000 years-and since we're 4 billion years old, it's all gone. But you can make it by putting natural uranium, which is mostly U238, into a reactor and radiating it with neutrons, and wind up eventually with a highly radioactive goo, then do a chemical extraction of plutonium by remote control." A few years ago the U.S. completed a Uranium Purchase Agreement with the Russian Federation that permitted removal of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from dismantled nuclear weapons. "This material," Gosnell elaborated, "is blended down in Russia to the low enrichment specifications for commercial power reactors, [then] sent to the U.S. where it is further processed at the DOE Portsmouth enrichment facility." Eventually it's sold to commercial nuclear fuel providers. Consequently, inspection of items containing HEU is under consideration for future agreements as well. When Gosnell called up photos on his laptop of his colleagues and himself in scrubs at Rocky Flats as they inspected barrels of weapons-grade plutonium, making sure that "candidate U.S. inspection technologies would indeed perform as expected on our own weapons components," I asked whether he worries about contamination. No, he answered, explaining that his work early on in the private sector with plutonium samples and, later, his studies at Cal, where he examined the safety aspects of radiation, helped him learn how to work with the material. Besides, he added, referring to personnel at such facilities as Rocky Flats, "They're exceedingly risk-averse. They've had a lot of bad publicity in the past, and now they go to real extremes" to ensure safety. Which is not to say, of course, that an accident could not happen, just that one is less likely now than in the past. Contrasting his situation to that of the Russians who went into Chernobyl after the meltdown, Gosnell stated, "Those folks are national heroes. They knew what they were up against and accepted the risks." An old and not particularly funny joke goes, "I don't know what weapon will win the next war, but the one after that will be won with sticks and stones." Ridding the world of nukes, if it can be done at all, will surely require heroic measures from all of us, not the least of which will involve trusting former enemies. As slow as the process of building trust is, and as frustrating as each delay in START is, disarmament will not likely occur in the absence of treaties and transparency measures. The good news is, for every warhead collecting dust in a storage facility somewhere, there are hundreds of dedicated humans-and Tom Gosnell is one of them-working to see that it never gets launched. Beth Spencer, University Publications |
|
|
||
CHICO STATEMENTS HOME | FEATURES | ALUMNEWS | DEPARTMENTS | SITE MAP CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO HOME | INDEX | E-MAIL | CATALOG | SCHEDULE | LIBRARY | HELP  |
||||
