To the state Department of Agriculture, an irradiator proposed for a site near Honolulu International Airport is the key to expanding agriculture on O'ahu and Kaua'i by boosting Hawai'i exports of tropical fruits and other crops.

But some residents who live in the Kalihi-Palama area are alarmed at the project, and say few people know about plans for a facility that would use radioactive cobalt-60 to treat papayas and other produce.

Bernadette Young, chairwoman of the Kalihi-Palama Neighborhood Board, said the irradiator is another example of an undesirable project being dumped in the area.

"They always come to areas where they think the community is poor and uneducated, and this is what gets me," she said. "We're not the only ones taking the risk now. It would be people that work in the area, people driving through the area. There's a lot of questions that are unanswered."

Environmentalists also are challenging the Honolulu irradiator project before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with the environmentalist organization Earthjustice filing to request a formal hearing before the NRC.

Earthjustice also wants Pa'ina Hawai'i LLC, the Hawai'i-based company that plans to build the irradiator, to do a federal environmental impact statement or environmental assessment to allow the public more opportunity to study and comment on the irradiator proposal.

Pa'ina Hawai'i filings with the NRC contend the commission has ruled the project is exempt from any federal requirements for an environmental assessment or impact statement.

David Henkin, staff attorney for the Honolulu office of Earthjustice, said the application by Pa'ina Hawai'i LLC before the NRC seeks to allow up to a million curies (units of radioactivity) of cobalt-60 in an irradiator planned for the airport industrial area.

Henkin said the area is in a tsunami inundation zone, and the proposed irradiator site is next to the reef runway.

"There are concerns here about accidents, and there are also concerns about the potential for sabotage or terrorism," Henkin said. "You've basically placed a huge source of radiation at the major gateway to Hawai'i, the international airport."

As for the need for the facility, Henkin argued it is "not a matter of life and death. The goal is to get a fresh papaya to someone in California, and there's a limit to how much risk the people of Honolulu should be taking in order to allow the company to make a profit from selling its papayas on the Mainland."

Pa'ina Hawai'i LLC's most recent filing before the NRC calls the project a "run-of-the-mill" irradiator. The filing notes that there was a cobalt-60 irradiator at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa for 40 years with no leaks, and points out that O'ahu is home to nuclear-powered submarines and bunkers designed to hold nuclear bombs.

"In light of the above, it would seem that Pa'ina's irradiator is a very small part of the nuclear universe which characterizes present-day Honolulu," according to the company's Oct. 26 filing in the case.

The requests for an environmental impact statement and formal hearings on the project are pending before the NRC.

Michael Kohn, president of Pa'ina, said the irradiator is needed to allow tropical agriculture to grow in Hawai'i, and compared the facility to critical infrastructure such as the shipping capacity that allowed sugar cultivation to flourish in pre-statehood Hawai'i.

Farmers need to be able to sell their produce outside of Hawai'i to prosper here, he said. As it is, farmers are extremely cautious today because if they grow too much for the local market, the price plummets, or the farmers are stuck with produce they cannot sell.

"For that, we need to have export markets that will take the excess," he said. The irradiator is necessary because produce from Hawai'i cannot be shipped to the Mainland unless it is treated to prevent the spread of fruit flies.

The Big Island already has an irradiator to treat produce for export, but a second point of export is needed to continue the growth in diversified agriculture, said Lyle Wong, administrator of the state Department of Agriculture's Plant Industry Division.

Growers need assurances they can get their produce to market before they will expand production, and farmers on Kaua'i, Maui and O'ahu need to be able to ship from Honolulu, he said.

"It's just impossible to conceive of a thriving, expanding diversified ag in the state with a single facility," he said.

Eric Weinert, senior vice president for Hawai'i Pride, which runs the Big Island irradiator, said that facility is operating at less than 35 percent of capacity.

However, Wong said, that is partly because of restrictions Hawai'i Pride placed on farmers who want to use the facility. Wong said Hawai'i Pride turns away fruit from farmers who cannot meet the facility's volume requirements.

Kohn said the Honolulu project will cost "several millions" of dollars to develop, but declined to be more specific. He also declined to identify the investors involved in the project.

Kohn hopes to put the irradiator on property he would lease from the state Department of Transportation in the industrial area near the airport.

If that lease is approved, Henkin and state Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland, D-13th (Kalihi, Nu'uanu) have asked state transportation officials to require a state environmental assessment or impact statement before the project is built.

Scott Ishikawa, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said DOT officials are watching to see how the NRC handles the issue before deciding how to proceed.

Kohn said the issues of safety and potential security risks are "strictly up to the NRC," which has the expertise to decide if the facility is safe.

Young worries there could be an accident or explosion at the facility, or a plane crash at the irradiator that would contaminate the area.

When Pa'ina made a presentation on the project at the neighborhood board in October, "they said it's not going to happen," Young said. "Excuse me, who died and made them God? How are they going to know things are not going to happen?"

Similar plans to build a cobalt irradiator on the Big Island triggered widespread opposition in the late 1990s. Voters narrowly defeated a proposal to amend the county code to prohibit radioactive material in commercial irradiation facilities in a 1998 ballot initiative, and the plan for a cobalt irradiator was dropped.

The Hawai'i Pride irradiator did open on the Big Island in 2000, but that facility uses X-ray technology instead of cobalt-60 to treat papayas and other produce for export.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.