Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 3, 1990 TAG: 9005030678
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
It's not a pretty sight.
The view is incomplete, but among the things you can see are drug use, thievery, fires, computer tampering, equipment failures and almost daily contamination of workers by plutonium or other lethal or toxic nuclear weapons materials.
And that's just the unclassified stuff.
The failings are catalogued in a 6-inch stack of internal reports made public by the Energy Department on Monday, six weeks after a department contractor made their existence known by mistakenly sending copies of one report to governors' offices.
The release of the papers, called daily operations reports and written for Energy Secretary James Watkins, marks a significant, if limited, crack in the wall of secrecy behind which the nuclear arms makers have operated for nearly a half-century.
The weapons plants are owned by the Energy Department but operated by private contractors.
The reports, covering the period of Aug. 24, 1989, to present, describe problems ranging in seriousness from safety lapses at the Savannah River nuclear reactors, to concern about "media noise" over environmental problems at the Rocky Flats arms plant near Denver, to an offsite fight between Savannah River electricians in South Carolina.
Much of the information, presented in a shorthand form with little or no explanation, had not previously been made public.
Watkins told a group of weapons plant critics on Monday that the reports showed conditions at the plants were "awful, just awful" last summer but are now improving.
Among the more serious failures:
A backup system for pumping water to cool one of the Savannah River nuclear reactors may have been unusable for the past five years because of missing wiring. Engineers discovered the wiring was missing last December.
Significant uranium releases at the Hanford weapons plant in Washington state were not reported for several months. The reason: the releases occurred after the Energy Department standard for radiation protection was inadvertently canceled in January 1989, but before it was reinstated in July 1989.
A faulty circuit breaker started two fires in a powerhouse at Savannah River last August, forcing two nuclear materials processing operations to be shut down for several days. No one was reported injured; damage was estimated at $50,000.
Security guards at several weapons plants were dismissed or resigned after being arrested for theft of government-owned guns and other property. A guard at the Nevada Test Site, where warheads are detonated in underground tests, resigned in February after he was arrested for holding stolen property, including two rifles, one shotgun and five handguns he carried in his personal vehicle.
In April, a security guard at Savannah River was accused of sleeping on duty after a supervisor at one of the reactor buildings walked into his locked and darkened office to find the guard "getting up from the floor." A later report said not enough evidence was found to make the charge stick.
Illegal drug use was reported throughout the weapons complex. In one nine-day period in November, nine cases of illegal drug use were reported at five plants or laboratories. In September an operator of one of the Savannah River nuclear reactors was suspended after testing positive for unspecified drug use.
Many of the reports to Watkins simply kept him advised of the status of such administrative problems as negotiations with contractors, suppliers and unions, or visits to plants by members of Congress, the news media or independent investigators.
Others described incidents that, viewed in isolation, may have been minor but taken together form a pattern of procedural violations that could lead to serious accidents in one of the most potentially hazardous working environments on Earth.
For example:
An unspecified violation of safety limits for nuclear materials at Rocky Flats was not reported to plant managers until four days after it was discovered.
A worker at the Argonne nuclear laboratory in Illinois was seen sawing through a pipe that had been specially painted to indicate it was radioactive.
Operations involving the metal beryllium at the Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee were suspended for more than a month last fall to improve hygiene practices and tighten operating procedures and engineering controls. Exposure to airborne beryllium dust has been associated with an incurable lung disease, berylliosis.
by CNB