Environment: Big Trouble at Savannah River

The revelations were enough to curl the hair on the neck of the most seasoned nuclear engineer. Last April a reactor at the Federal Government’s sprawling Savannah River Plant near Aiken, S.C., was shut down to upgrade safety systems — with partially irradiated tritium still in its core. In August technicians, oblivious to the decaying radioactive material inside, tried to restart the reactor but were unable to keep it going. The next day they tried again. Ignoring procedure, they set off an abnormal jump in nuclear fission, usually a sign of imminent trouble. Workers ignored the warning, forcing plant officials to intervene to shut down the reactor.

For decades, such incidents have been alarmingly frequent at the aging facility, which manufactures materials for nuclear bombs. Moreover, officials at the Department of Energy, which oversees the plant, conceded last week that dozens of such near accidents and nuclear mishaps have gone largely unreported for more than 30 years. Admitted DOE safety chief Richard Starostecki: “If this had been a civilian plant, it would have been shut down.”

Ever since it went on line in 1953, the Savannah River facility has operated behind a barrier of secrecy so impenetrable that officials in Washington were often in the dark. In recent months Government investigators have begun to turn up internal memos that are shattering the silence. The result: a congressional hearing that revealed a stunning list of nuclear incidents caused by a combination of primitive instrumentation, inadequately trained personnel and a management meltdown by both DOE and E.I. du Pont de Nemours, which runs the plant for the Federal Government. The impact on the environment is not yet fully known, but thousands of gallons of radioactive material have already leaked into the groundwater. The contamination, says a 1985 Du Pont memo, may exist “centuries or millennia into the future.”

The pivotal facility is projected to consume 19% of the $8.1 billion DOE budget for weapons production next year. Some 17,900 people work on its 192,323-acre site, even though two of Savannah River’s five reactors are shut down permanently, and the others are not allowed to run at full power in part because of deficiencies in their emergency cooling systems. Still, the plant is the sole supplier of plutonium and tritium, the flint and steel of nuclear warheads. While the nation probably has all the plutonium it needs, tritium, which enhances plutonium’s yield, has a half-life of twelve years and must be continuously produced to maintain the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Shortly after his appointment in 1985, Secretary of Energy John Herrington established an internal DOE team, known as the “junkyard dogs,” to look into safety problems at federal nuclear facilities. After the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Herrington turned to the National Academy of Sciences to assess the situation in South Carolina. An academy panel concluded last year that DOE was torn by the “conflicting responsibilities” of meeting production quotas while maintaining safety. Operation of the facilities, it said, had been left in the hands of “largely self-regulated contractors,” while safety oversight was “ingrown and largely outside the scrutiny of the public.”

Those conclusions were confirmed this year when congressional investigators began questioning Savannah River personnel about local press reports alleging that reactors had gone “out of control” during start-up operations. While the investigators found no evidence of disastrous accidents and only occasional danger to plant workers or the public, they were stunned by the management inadequacies. Among the most damaging evidence: a memo by Du Pont plant supervisor G.C. Ridgely that listed 30 “reactor incidents of greatest significance” between 1957 and 1985.

Another memo, prepared by Du Pont engineer Frederick Christensen when he retired in 1981, noted that one mishap in 1965 could have turned into a catastrophe when a foreman wanted to stop a coolant leak by closing off the flow of water to the reactor. The foreman was stopped by a senior supervisor who realized that the action would result in a steam buildup and a possible explosion in the reactor. Wrote Christensen: “One trained man stood between us and disaster.”

Du Pont, for its part, is calling it quits at Savannah River. Early next year the company will turn over management of the facility to Westinghouse Electric. There will be plenty of work for the new operators. For starters, DOE wants to build a new reactor to make tritium. Also, Westinghouse will inherit 34 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid waste now kept in 51 aging storage tanks, which environmentalists fear may leak. “Making bombs is a dirty business,” says South Carolina environmentalist Frances Close Hart. “People don’t really know how to clean this stuff up.” That job, according to DOE estimates, may cost as much as $1 billion over at least two decades.