The federal government may not have been able to find a use for Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility, but maybe the community can, Benton County Commissioner Claude Oliver said Thursday.

A day after Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham ordered the research reactor permanently shut down, Oliver began talking of finding a way to take over the reactor as government surplus.

"They say it's headed for the wrecking ball," he said. "Maybe we can have it."

At a Dec. 31 commission meeting, he'll broach a plan to commit $250,000 of county money, possibly from a public works fund, to saving the reactor, he said.

Commissioners Leo Bowman and Max Benitz Jr. said the plan has not yet been presented to them and they'll wait until then to discuss it.

The $250,000 would be used to investigate legal and other issues and pull together a plan. Oliver envisions the community finding a wide range of companies and groups interested in the reactor.

The county is in a better position to do that than the Department of Energy, which took a look at just one proposal, a plan put together by Advanced Nuclear and Medical Systems of Richland, Oliver said.

"Why can't we as a community be given an opportunity to put together a proposal?" he asked. "I want to get away from politics and (DOE headquarters) saying we can't do things."

Wednesday the DOE announced that a plan to commercialize the reactor to produce medical isotopes carried too many financial risks to the government. The current Republican administration agreed with the former Democratic administration that DOE has no use for the reactor and it should be permanently shut down.

DOE figured that if the commercialization plan failed after the reactor was restarted, it could be left with as much as $1 billion in expenses. That includes costs of disposing of unused fuel, the expense of keeping the reactor in standby condition until isotope production began and costs of later decommissioning the reactor.

That compares with estimated costs of about $250 million to shut down the reactor over the next almost six years.

However, supporters of restarting the reactor said the $1 billion figure is inflated and doesn't take into account new money coming into the project, such as $35.8 million from Germany to take unwanted nuclear fuel. Supporters want the reactor used to make isotopes primarily for medicine, including new ways of treating cancer.