Safety of U.S. Reactors Challenged in Studies : Dept. of Energy Internal Reports Repeatedly Question Agency’s Own Systems, Procedures

The safety and management of government-owned nuclear plants across the United States has repeatedly been challenged in internal reports of the Department of Energy, the agency entrusted with the safe operation of the facilities.

A review by The Times of DOE internal investigations and interviews with officials at plants around the nation show that as recently as last year, the safety systems and procedures of DOE have been judged seriously inadequate.

While none of the reports conclude that the DOE-operated plants pose an immediate threat to public safety, the department has tacitly admitted the gravity of the charges in recent months by taking the first steps toward ensuring that, in the words of Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, “today’s activities” will not “create problems for tomorrow.”

The department’s conclusions about the integrity of its safety programs are receiving new scrutiny in the aftermath of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union. The department runs seven nuclear reactors that, like Chernobyl, have no protective containment domes, the last line of defense in the event of a major accident. Although some of the reactors are small experimental plants, five are major reactors that are comparable in size, though different in design, to Chernobyl.

The most recent probe, completed in the spring of 1985, produced a highly critical report that described the department’s now-defunct office of environment, safety and health as “a disgrace.”

“It has become a toothless watchdog guarding the safety and environmental integrity of one of the potentially most hazardous undertakings in the world,” the report concluded.

The report, authored by James Kane, then associate director of the department, cited longstanding problems in the management and implementation of safety programs for the DOE’s nuclear facilities.

“The problems I perceive cannot be solved simply,” Kane wrote. “They are a product of failure by many participants in managing the department over a period of perhaps a decade.”

The report said the department had allowed its office that was then responsible for the safety of its facilities “to atrophy.”

In response, Energy Secretary Herrington restructured the department last September and consolidated all safety programs under Assistant Secretary Mary Walker, who reports directly to him. He also ordered a review of more than 50 nuclear facilities run by the department in 11 states. That probe is expected to take three years, although Walker told a congressional hearing last week that it is being accelerated at the department’s five largest reactors in light of the accident in the Soviet Union.

The facilities are engaged in what Kane described as “one of the potentially most hazardous undertakings in the world,” including the production of nuclear fuel for weapons, research into all phases of the nuclear sciences, and reprocessing and long-term storage of extremely dangerous products from nuclear reactors.

Kane described the office within the Department of Energy that until September had been responsible for overseeing safety at those facilities as “a toothless watchdog.”

Supervision ‘In Shambles’

Kane’s report was distributed last Wednesday during a hearing before the House subcommittee on energy conservation and power. Committee Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said the report showed that “the department’s own oversight of environmental, safety and health is, quite frankly, in shambles.”

Walker testified that substantial progress has been made within the department “in its commitment to continuously improve the safety of its facilities.”

Although the report dealt primarily with management problems, the “trickle down” effect has been manifested in incidents in the field that raise questions about planning and preparation for nuclear emergencies.

For example, according to “unusual occurrence reports” on file in Richland, Wash., near the department’s Hanford nuclear reservation, during a July 13, 1980, emergency evacuation drill at the big reactor there workers rushed outside to board two buses, neither of which would start.

As federally operated plants, DOE reactors are exempt from the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and from regulations that agency imposes on commercial plants.

Not Up to Standard

A 1981 committee, headed by John Crawford, then DOE principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy, concluded that the department’s reactor safety requirements “are not considered to be comparable, either in specificity or rigor, to current Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements.”

The Crawford Committee also found serious fault with the department’s safety program, and according to the Kane report, more than four years later none of its recommendations had been adopted. The Crawford committee found, for example, that the department had not even evaluated what would happen if nuclear plant operators were forced out of the control room during a major accident.

Although the committee primarily addressed management problems and inadequate training for safety personnel, it also cited a number of specific problems with the department’s nuclear power plants.

One example is the type of fuel rods used in the department’s N reactor at the Hanford plant in southeastern Washington. Unlike nearly all commercial plants in the nation and other DOE reactors, the Hanford plant uses fuel rods clad in zirconium instead of aluminum. Zirconium can withstand higher pressures, but aluminum is considered safer.

Zirconium can react with water to produce explosive quantities of hydrogen gas, and that is one of the most frequently cited explanations for the explosion that ripped apart the Chernobyl reactor, spewing deadly radioactive poisons over much of Europe.

Could Pose Problems

The committee warned that the continued use of zirconium-clad fuels could pose serious problems at Hanford because of the potential for such problems, called “gas pocketing.”

But to this day the Hanford plant, which has no containment dome, still uses zirconium instead of aluminum cladding. Officials at Hanford defend the use of zirconium with the insistence that even in a “worst-case” accident at N reactor, there would be no hydrogen explosion because the reactor operates at lower temperatures than commercial plants and because the fuel is not left in the reactor long enough for significant pockets of gas to develop.

The Crawford committee also focused on training of operators for federal reactors, a significant finding in view of the fact that most serious accidents at nuclear installations are either caused or aggravated by human failures. The panel said improper workmanship was “frequently noted” to cause safety violations and reactor shutdowns.

The panel made more than 70 recommendations to upgrade reactor safety systems, strengthen employee training programs and vest nuclear safety managers at DOE headquarters in Washington with greater authority.

‘Deficiencies, Problems’

A separate “assessment support team” within the department, which reviewed the committee’s conclusions and submitted an appendix to the report, concurred in the findings of “deficiencies and problems in (Department of Energy) management within various headquarters, field offices and reactor contractor organizations.”

The team also found “no evidence” that the department’s reactors were being operated “unsafely.”

“However, there is evidence . . . that a number of corrective management actions are needed promptly . . . if (the department) is to continue to assure reactor safety.”

Department of Energy officials at Hanford said that many of the recommendations of the Crawford committee have since been adopted at the plant there, especially in training programs and on-site inspections by officials from DOE headquarters. But they said that many of the efforts are only now beginning to take effect, five years after the recommendations were made.

Nonetheless, last year, Energy Secretary Herrington ordered Kane, who had been a member of the Crawford committee, to take another look at the department’s safety policies and structure. Kane reached essentially the same conclusions as the earlier committee, and he emphasized that the committee’s 1981 recommendations “were not followed.”

Urges Consolidation

Kane’s chief recommendation was that the various safety functions that were then distributed throughout the department be consolidated under one top administrator. That prompted Herrington to create the position of assistant secretary for environment, safety and health, a position now held by Walker. That fell short of the Crawford committee’s recommendation that nuclear safety be isolated as the only responsibility of someone at the undersecretary level, but it served to consolidate safety under one person reporting directly to the secretary.

Herrington also ordered a major review of all of the department’s nuclear facilities.

In announcing the review, Herrington noted that some of those facilities “have been in use for nearly 40 years.”

“The problems are, for the most part, legacies from the past, from activities conducted in a different atmosphere and under different standards than today,” he said. The department inherited its nuclear program from the now-disbanded Atomic Energy Commission and the Energy Research Development Administration.

Many of the department’s reactors were built long before public concerns mounted over nuclear safety in the 1970s. The plants are located on huge, isolated federal reservations, which provides some protection to the general public simply by separation, and are housed in specially constructed confinement buildings, but they do not have massive steel and concrete domes designed to contain deadly radioactive materials during a “worst-case” accident such as a chemical explosion followed by a meltdown.

Risk Low, Cost High

The department has resisted suggestions from critics that it enclose its reactors in containment domes on the grounds that the risk is too low and the cost would be too high.

The domes would cost about $1 billion each to build, and in some cases the plants are laid out in such a way that any such effort would be a major engineering challenge.

Even the author of the Kane report, who now works for the University of California as liaison between UC President David P. Gardner and the university’s three major laboratories, said in an interview that while he would be a little more comfortable if the department’s reactors had been built originally with containment domes, he does not find their absence “really troublesome.”

“I really don’t think those reactors, if they operate the way they are supposed to be operated, are a threat to the public,” Kane said.

Kane said, however, that he is not an expert on the hardware problems at the department’s sites.

“My report dealt only with people-type questions,” he said. “I just looked at the management.”

He added that the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania proved that “the failure in management was as bad as the technical failures.”

Lee Dye reported from Los Angeles and Larry B. Stammer from Richland, Wash. Times staff writer Rudy Abramson in Washington also contributed to this story.