New Plant Sparks Concern, Controversy in Beaumont : Neighbors Grow Anxious as Nuclear Services Facility Nears Completion

More than 15 months ago, Westinghouse Electric Corp. quietly selected this bucolic Riverside County town on busy Interstate 10 for a major facility to service power plants throughout the West and overseas, including such nuclear facilities as California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon complexes.

Even before publicly announcing plans for the 50,000-square-foot service center on Jan. 17, 1984, Westinghouse officials flew three key local officials to South Carolina to show them how efficiently a similar facility there is run. Then they hosted a private dinner with the Beaumont City Council to sell it on the project.

Everything went smoothly. The council approved the project and Westinghouse was exempted from the time-consuming task of preparing an environmental impact report.

Today, an imposing reinforced concrete structure stands on 20 acres of what was once a cow pasture, ready to compete in a $2-billion-a-year field in which only a handful of American firms have the expertise to repair, refuel and modify the nation’s nuclear power plants.

Suddenly, however, Westinghouse finds itself awash in controversy over whether it was candid about the plant’s nuclear-related activities.

“It seems to have blown up in their face,” said Donus D. Honey, a senior official in the state Department of Health Services.

Hearing Expected

The department, which must license the plant to handle radioactive material, appears likely to order a public hearing on the license issue in response to growing public anxiety over the facility’s nuclear work, a spokesperson said.

Anti-nuclear activists are pressing the Beaumont City Council to reverse a ruling by the recently fired city manager and require Westinghouse to complete an environmental impact report on the plant. And two former city officials are taking public potshots at each other over how the environmental issue was handled.

Activists demonstrated in front of the plant on Saturday and released black balloons that floated over the nearby desert carrying the message: “If this balloon could reach you, so could radiation.”

For their part, officials of Westinghouse, based in Pittsburgh, say the growing brouhaha is much ado about nothing. No environmental report is needed, they have certified to the city of Beaumont, because the plant poses no danger to the community.

“The service center will not have materials that can produce high levels of radiation,” says a question-and-answer booklet published by the company and available to the community. “Controlled areas of the service center will have very low levels of radiation similar to what you might find where radiation is used for medical or industrial purposes. . . . There would be virtually no radiation from the service center,” the publication says.

Work Detailed

To dispel any further doubts, Westinghouse officials have attempted to spell out in detail what work would be performed inside the plant.

Company officials say that about 25 Westinghouse technicians--increasing in a few years to 100 workers--would be trained at the facility to service nuclear power plants in a vast area stretching from Texas to Japan.

Westinghouse’s work tools, soiled with radioactive elements, would be trucked to the Beaumont plant, where they would be cleaned. The roughly 5,000 gallons of water a month used to wash the tools would be purified inside the plant before being pumped into Beaumont’s sewage system.

The structure itself, said Westinghouse officials, would have a special inward air flow system to contain 99.97% of any radioactive elements in the building.

Small amounts of low-level radioactive sludge from the tools would be stored in 12-gauge steel shipping containers with a capacity of 96 cubic feet, company officials said. Ultimately, they said, about 20 waste containers a year are expected to be hauled by truck to a federal nuclear dump site in Hanford, Wash.

The level of radioactivity inside the plant at any one time, generated by this waste or by work at the plant, would be well within the state’s safety limit of 10 curies as specified in its pending Department of Health Services license, said Lee Smith, Westinghouse’s radiation safety officer. A curie is a unit used in measuring radioactivity.

Private Dinner

Much of the controversy dates to the January day last year when Westinghouse announced its intention to break ground in this community, astride the scenic San Gorgonio Pass about 75 miles east of Los Angeles.

That night in the Rusty Lantern, a local restaurant, Westinghouse executives and the man who was then city manager had a private dinner with Beaumont’s five city councilmen at which, according to those present, it was agreed that the facility would be a distinct plus for this community of about 7,000 people, about half of whom are retired.

City Manager Norman J. Davis believed that the Westinghouse project would help lure other high-tech industries to the community, which was having difficulty holding its younger population, according to accounts of the meeting.

All of the councilmen agreed with Davis’ assessment.

Davis was one of three local officials who got expense-paid trips from Westinghouse to South Carolina about two weeks before the firm publicly announced that it had selected a Beaumont site. The others were John Fanning, the environmental health director for Riverside County, and now-retired county development manager Fred Reinhardt.

(Westinghouse officials said that at the time they viewed Fanning and Reinhardt as key bureaucrats who could help them win approval for the plan, because the site at the time was in unincorporated territory. The Beaumont City Council voted to annex the land into the city a few months after the South Carolina trip, however, and only Davis worked directly on the project.)

Violation Alleged

Alan Manee, Beaumont’s former planning director, charged in an interview that the meeting at the Rusty Lantern--which Manee attended--was in violation of the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, which prohibits most private meetings of public agencies.

One councilman who attended that meeting, Irish Mitchell, a former trucking industry lobbyist and local realtor, said Manee could be right. Another councilman who also was there, Beaumont Mayor Matthew J. Russo, said however that Manee was wrong because “there were no decisions made at that meeting.” Two other councilmen sided with Russo, and one said he did not remember the session.

The Brown act says: “All meetings of the legislative body of a local agency shall be open and public, and all persons shall be permitted to attend any meeting. . . .”

Manee, 41, a former state and Santa Barbara County environmental planner, contended in an interview at his Yucaipa home that he pushed hard to force Westinghouse to do an environmental impact report on the plant.

This, he said, placed him in a cross fire between City Manager Davis and Jack J. Bastin, the Westinghouse plant manager, both of whom favored placing the permit process on the fast track.

Davis “had the pressure on me all the time” to accelerate Westinghouse’s permits, Manee said. “Get it done (without an environmental impact report) and get out of here,” was how Manee recalled Davis’ instructions.

‘Properly Handled’

Manee was fired by Davis last May 7. No official reason was given, but City Atty. George R. Ryskamp told The Times that the firing was “reviewed by our office, and it was properly handled.” Manee did not appeal the firing.

The same day, according to City Hall records, Davis appointed himself acting planning director and exempted Westinghouse from filing an environmental impact report, clearing the way for swift approval of the plant by the city planning commission and council.

In an interview at his Beaumont home, Davis vigorously defended his exemption decision. His visit to the firm’s South Carolina plant, he said, convinced him that the operation is “absolutely clean, absolutely safe . . . cleaner than any hospital I’ve been in. . . . It definitely doesn’t need an EIR.”

Westinghouse’s critics, he charged, were “a bunch of agitators and troublemakers. . . . People are irrational on the subject.”

Davis, a contractor and former Riverside County supervisor who was fired last February after three council members were recalled, has accused Manee of mounting “a personal vendetta” against him.

Manee, now a Riverside County transportation planner, is divorcing Davis’ daughter.

Bastin declined to comment on Manee’s allegations.

Manee, however, is not the only one asking for a fresh look at how Westinghouse treated the environmental review issue.

Lying Charged

Dollie Irwin, a 49-year-old widow who lives in adjacent Banning, has led a community assault on Westinghouse. She charges that the firm lied when it responded to a key question last April on Beaumont’s environmental review application form.

The question she cites: “Name and describe all toxic and hazardous materials which you use or plan to use on this site.”

The Westinghouse response: “No toxic or hazardous materials will be used at this site.”

Bastin, who signed the environmental application, said the answer was certified as correct even though the firm informed the state Department of Health Services that a variety of radioactive elements would be handled at the plant. He said Beaumont officials told him to answer the question as defined by the Environmental Protection Administration.

The EPA administers 11 federal laws. Some of them, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, classify radioactive materials as hazardous. Under the EPA’s waste management laws, the code Westinghouse used, there is no such classification.

“There’s no way in hell that you could ever answer that question the way they did,” Manee said.

“The company’s interest would have been much better served if it had made full disclosure,” a more subdued Honey said. He added that he does not think his agency can require an environmental impact report on the project; that decision, he said, must be made by the city.

Vocal Opponents

Irwin, along with Palm Springs activist Carolyn Toenjes, helped form the Desert Pass Action Group late last year. The organization’s small but vocal membership counts among its supporters anti-nuclear activists in the Beaumont-Banning and Palm Springs areas who have been lobbying to block any nuclear-related work at the plant.

The Desert Pass group argues that a nuclear leak could lead to dangerous radionuclides being carried downwind through the San Gorgonio Pass to the populous Palm Springs area.

Furthermore, Irwin and her colleagues contend that the site, near three earthquake faults and a major freight rail line, is a poor one with potentially dangerous consequences to the community in case of a nuclear accident.

Westinghouse calls such comments irresponsible.

That does not impress Irwin.

“Little people in little towns shouldn’t be intimidated by three-piece suits,” she said. “They should start asking questions and be persistent.”

The controversy is catching the attention of others as well. Democratic Assemblyman Steve Clute and Riverside County Supervisor Kay S. Ceniceros, both of whom represent the Beaumont area, and Fanning, the county environmental health director, told The Times that they now believe that Westinghouse should submit to an environmental review.

“Unfortunately, the system (of environmental checks) has failed,” Clute said. He said he is exploring whether the state can legally overturn the local exemption.

Cover-Up Denied

Clute expressed his concerns in a meeting here last Friday with Bastin, Russo, two other councilmen and directors of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Bastin, 42, who began with the firm as a clerk 23 years ago, denied that there was an effort to cover up the complex’s nuclear-related activities. He said that last year alone he made about 25 presentations to Beaumont civic groups in an effort to specifically explain the plant’s nuclear-related activities.

“When you’re dealing with the public, it’s just not always easy to make your point,” he said in an interview in a temporary office in a trailer adjacent to the almost-completed plant. “You just have to keep trying. . . . Let me say this: I gave it my best shot.”

Although three council members have been replaced as a result of the recall election last November (which resulted from issues largely unrelated to the Westinghouse plant), the majority--three of five--appears to favor leaving Westinghouse alone.

For the moment, Westinghouse is gearing up for non-nuclear activities; the complex’s nuclear power plant servicing work appears to be stymied until the state gives it the go-ahead.

Some, including Toenjes, hope that day never arrives.

“I think,” she recently said with a wistful smile, “that building would be a very nice place for (Westinghouse) to start selling refrigerators again.”