Excerpt from Department of Defense Authorization for Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2002, Vol. 7: Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, Second Session on S. 1416 Every us. Nuclear warhead requires tritium to function as designed. Because tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, decays at the rate of percent per year, it must be periodically replenished within each nuclear warhead. We have not pro duced tritium since 1988, and our inventory, depending on the results of the Strate gic Defense Review, is sufficient only until approximately 2005, after which time the 5-year tritium reserve we maintain may begin to be drawn down. In May 1999, the Department announced that tva commercial light water reactors would be used to produce tritium, and that accelerator production of tritium (apt) technology would be developed as backup, by completing preliminary design and engineering develop ment and demonstration activities. A 30-year interagency agreement with tva went into effect on January 1, 2000, making three of its reactors, Watts Bar and Sequoyah 1 and 2, available to begin irradiation of tritium production absorber rods, as early as October 2003. This month, tva submitted a request to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc) to amend its operating license for the Watts Bar and Sequoyah reactors, to permit ir radiation of tritium producing absorber rods. The nrc committed to expediting the approval of these requests. On July 27, 2000, ground was broken for the new Tritium Extraction Facility (tef) at the Savannah River Site and, during fiscal year 2001, site preparation and detailed design for the facility is expected to be completed. Originally, construction of tef was to have begun in early fiscal year 1999, but language in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1999 prohibited any tritium construction activities during fiscal year 1999. Because of this delay in schedule, we project that the tef will not begin delivering tritium gas from irradiated absorber rods until February 2006. Depending on the results of the Strategic Defense Review, about 1 year of the 5-year tritium reserve may be consumed. The capacity of tef to extract tritium from the absorber rods will be sufficient to restore the reserve, within 2 to 3 years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.