Safety Unit Won’t Endorse Restarting A-Arms Reactors

WASHINGTON — An independent panel of safety experts advising the Energy Department declined Tuesday to endorse the agency’s plan for restarting its nuclear weapons production reactors at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, saying that the detailed plan failed to explain adequately how a number of safety issues will be resolved.

However, panel members said that the need for refinements in the plan does not rule out the possibility that the department will be able to restart one of the three tritium-producing reactors by this summer and have all three running by the end of the year, as the agency intends.

“This is only a midterm grade,” not a failing mark, Harold Lewis, one of the panel’s 12 members, told reporters during a public session. Lewis, a professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara, added that “we’re not endorsing a summer restart, and we’re not ruling it out . . . . But this is going to take a substantial technical effort.”

The panel said that the department needs to clarify its plans for reinforcing the reactors’ resistance to earthquakes, improve lines of authority in control rooms and justify the margin of safety in its current plan to operate the first of the three units at 50% of maximum power.

All three reactors were closed between April and August for safety modifications after the National Academy of Sciences said in late 1987 that the 35-year-old units were showing clear signs of deterioration as they neared the end of their useful lives.

The reactors are the only domestic source of tritium, a perishable form of hydrogen gas used in nuclear weapons that must be replenished every few years.

The department had hoped to restart the first unit, the K-reactor, this month, but officials now say that a continuing review of equipment and management improvements needed at Savannah River has forced a postponement to spring or, more likely, summer.

The latest problem to come to light is a crack discovered in a section of main coolant pipe on another of the three units, the L-reactor. Richard W. Starostecki, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for safety, said that the crack appears at a spot where seismic bracing was welded to the stainless steel pipe years earlier.

Starostecki said that the cause of the crack and its relevance to the safety of the two other units are still undetermined. The pipe was removed 18 months ago but was examined for signs of cracking only recently.

The panel, appointed earlier this year by Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, critiqued the agency’s strategy for restarting the Savannah River reactors in a 16-page draft letter to Herrington.

Letter Not Released

However, panel Chairman John F. Ahearne--an outspoken former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission--refused to release copies of the draft letter on the grounds that it remained a confidential working document.

Ahearne described the department’s current planning as a “first step” and, referring to the current start-up schedule, added: “Obviously, some of us have a lot of doubt whether it can be met.”

“We’re not in a position to endorse the strategy or not endorse it. We have questions,” said Dana A. Powers, a panel member from Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, N.M.

One major unresolved safety issue, Powers said, is the possibility of cracking because of stress or corrosion in the thick metal vessel containing the uranium fuel in each reactor.

Years of internal stress and corrosion led to cracking in a fourth Savannah River unit, the C-reactor, which forced its permanent closure in 1986. Engineers at Savannah River have developed new ultrasonic equipment to inspect the three remaining reactors, but the department’s plan contemplates restarting them before the inspections--which take 52 days for each reactor--are finished.

“Mechanically, this is a lot easier to do when the fuel is out of the reactor,” before it is restarted, Powers said. “It would seem prudent to inspect . . . . We’re asking them for a justification for not accelerating their inspections.”

Another pending issue, Powers said, is the reorganization of safety responsibilities in the reactor control rooms. New layers of supervision are being added, raising fears that too many people watching over one another’s shoulders might only add to control room confusion in an emergency.

“The concern that too many cooks spoil the broth is a major question on our minds,” Powers said. “Clear lines of authority are absolutely essential.”

As the panel met, three environmental groups filed suit Tuesday in federal District Court in Washington in an effort to compel the department to prepare an environmental impact statement before restarting the reactors.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Energy Research Foundation and Greenpeace USA argued that restarting the reactors constitutes a “major federal action” under the terms of the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969, requiring a thorough review of its potential effects. Such reviews typically take six months to a year to complete.

Douglas Elmets, the department’s chief spokesman, said that the agency has consulted informally with the groups over the last several weeks. “While we did not reach an agreement, the department intends to meet all its obligations under (the environmental act),” Elmets said in a prepared statement that stopped short of conceding to the three groups’ demand.