Pipes Called ‘Puff Pastry Made of Steel’ : Soviet Nuclear Industry Riddled With Problems

The chief construction engineer at the Soviet Union’s Balakovo Atomic Energy Station was furious. Pipes for the power plant had been delivered and they were simply no good. The metal did not meet specifications and was filled with air pockets and other clearly visible defects.

“A piece of puff pastry made of steel!” the irate engineer complained to a deputy minister of ferrous metallurgy. He was even blunter with the pipe manufacturer: “Complete junk! After all, it is (for) a nuclear plant!”

The troubled engineer, quoted in a 1982 article in Soviet Russia, one of the nation’s major newspapers, has found plenty of empathy among his comrades in the atomic energy program.

Indeed, as a close reading of the state-controlled media reveals, the ambitious Soviet nuclear industry has been riddled for years with a host of construction and manufacturing problems that, in light of last month’s accident at Chernobyl, raise new questions about the safety and reliability of the country’s 15 atomic energy stations with 40 reactors.

In recent years, reports and criticism of widespread mismanagement, supply bottlenecks, ill-equipped and unsafe reactor manufacturing plants, an improperly trained construction work force, poor workmanship, uncertain quality control, missed schedules, corruption and theft have regularly appeared in the Soviet media, which are available in the West.

“This is a kind of problem of quality control and quality construction that Soviet industry has a hard time dealing with,” said Robert W. Campbell, an Indiana University professor of economics who is a specialist on Soviet energy.

At one plant, for instance, construction was completed ahead of schedule but, it turned out, a power transmission line had not been built. At Atomash, the country’s flagship reactor manufacturing plant, buildings began sinking into the ground. At the Khmelnitsky plant in the Ukraine, top construction officials stole building materials and embezzled funds.

Such official candor about industrial shortcomings in the nuclear program is not surprising because of the Soviet media’s prescribed role of serving Kremlin policy.

On the one hand, the press regularly hails the atomic energy industry as the technological flagship of the Soviet Union’s backward economy, extolling its undeniable achievements and declaring it the solution to the country’s looming energy crisis. On the other hand, the Kremlin leadership often uses the press to spur production and remedy problems in quality control, even if it means public embarrassment.

No Unfettered Discussion

What is missing in the Soviet media, however, is any unfettered discussion about safety or any other issues that might undermine the country’s crash nuclear power program, undertaken to maintain the Soviet Union’s energy self-sufficiency at a time of diminishing resources.

The most noteworthy exception came in a March article in the periodical Ukrainian Literature, which said construction at the ill-fated Chernobyl plant had been marred by low morale, poor workmanship and persistent shortages of construction materials.

Author Liubov Kovalevska then explicitly linked manufacturing and labor problems to reactor safety with these prophetic words: “The failures will be repaid; repaid over the decades to come.”

In a televised address Wednesday night, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said that it is too early to decide what caused the Chernobyl disaster but that a government commission is looking into all aspects of the accident.

“The indisputable lesson of Chernobyl,” he said, is that “the questions of reliability and safety of equipment, the questions of discipline, order and organization assume priority importance.”

The Soviet Union began its civilian nuclear energy program in 1954 with a small (5,000-kilowatt) graphite-moderated, water-cooled installation in Obninsk. By 1965, the Soviet Union had three more working reactors.

In 1970, with 13 reactors and an encouraging history of reducing costs, the Soviet Union was ready to launch a major expansion of its nuclear energy program to serve its Eastern European allies and, more importantly, the future needs of its own large cities and industrial centers, which are west of the Urals and far from the new fossil energy reserves located in Siberia.

By 1980, the gains in nuclear generating capacity, while short of projections, were indisputably impressive: Capacity had jumped 800% from 1970.

Boost for A-Power

In the early 1980s, as oil production began to level off, Kremlin leaders decided that the entire increase in electric power west of the Urals would come from nuclear power. And as recently as Feb. 26, addressing the 27th Communist Party Congress, Gorbachev announced that, in the next five years, 2 1/2 times more nuclear reactors would come on line than in the previous five-year plan.

Along with the speedup came voluminous reports in the Soviet media documenting that the nuclear industry was not immune to the problems endemic to other sectors of socialist economies, according to Leslie Fox, a University of Paris researcher who is considered a leading Western authority on East Bloc nuclear energy programs.

For example, a front-page editorial in the Dec. 8, 1981, issue of Socialist Industry listed a litany of complaints against the reactor construction industry: Work crews frequently did not have the proper training for the complex task of installing reactors; morale was low; construction was hampered by erratic delivery of building material and equipment; spare parts for reactor stations were lacking; better quality control was needed “throughout the manufacturing process.”

Leadership’s Imprimatur

And on Feb. 5, 1982, a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union put the imprimatur of the top leadership on the urgent need to deal with shortcomings in reactor construction, according to the report of the meeting distributed by Tass, the official Soviet news agency.

That was followed by months of sustained critiques of the industry, part of a more general campaign to tighten labor discipline promoted by then-ascendant Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov.

Pravda front-paged an editorial on Feb. 26, 1982, blasting delays in commissioning reactors in Smolensk, Kursk and the southern Ukraine. The Communist Party newspaper attacked interruptions in deliveries of gravel and criticized planning institutes that were late in providing detailed building specifications--and which then changed plans in mid-course. The editorial also declared that there was “evidence of the old tradition of power station construction beginning without having carried out the necessary engineering preparations.”

And in April, 1982, the Economics Gazette blamed the Ministry of Power and Electrification, which constructs power plants, for problems in planning, organization, work quality and morale at the Yuzhno-Ukraine and Smolensk atomic energy stations.

Another Industry Hit

In a front-page editorial Aug. 31, 1982, Izvestia, the government newspaper, singled out the Ministry of Power Machine Building, which manufactures reactor equipment, for failing to meet production targets.

“These failures, especially when due to organizational shortcomings, are intolerable,” the newspaper wrote.

At the Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislative body, member Yevgeny T. Mitrin said supply bottlenecks delayed construction of atomic energy stations and some of the equipment that was delivered was seriously defective, according to an Izvestia report on Oct. 30, 1982.

“The work of contract organizations which fail to observe the planned construction rate . . . deserve censure,” Mitrin said.

One of the strangest episodes revealed by the Soviet media took place at Volgodonsk, site of the giant Atomash plant, which was designed as the Soviet flagship for producing atomic reactor equipment but was plagued from the beginning in 1975 by delays.

Some buildings in the complex actually began to sink into the ground, according to a Pravda report that appeared Sept. 15, 1983.

“Those who should know better failed to take into consideration the peculiarities of the subsoil here. . . . People were evacuated. The rumor went around that ‘Volgodonsk is adrift,’ ” wrote reporter N. Kryukov.

‘Crude Violations’

The Politburo itself got involved in the recriminations, discussing the “crude violations . . . committed by leaders of certain ministries, departments, and their subordinate organizations in planning, building and operating production. . . . Those to blame were severely punished,” Kryukov continued.

In May, 1985, the Atomash plant again was cited, along with the Izhorsky reactor equipment plant near Leningrad, for routinely violating safety regulations, and in particular failure to use and maintain hoisting equipment properly. Cranes were allowed to work on damaged tracks with ill-adjusted brakes, according to an Izvestia article.

Agreed With Criticism

At the Khmelnitsky atomic reactor station in the Ukraine, the local party committee sat down to analyze a Pravda critique about construction work that appeared Aug. 19, 1983. Not surprisingly, they decided, according to an Oct. 26 follow-up article, that Pravda’s criticism of inadequate housing for construction workers was “justified.”

Proceedings then were instituted against the top two construction officials. The second ranking echelon was “severely” reprimanded.

But the party officials didn’t stop there.

Acting local prosecutor V. Pedun found a rat’s nest of corruption.

“A whole host of violations has come to light,” the newspaper wrote, adding that equipment was not guarded, record-keeping was lax and embezzlement “permitted.”

Worse shortcomings were uncovered in 1984 at the giant Ignalina atomic power station in Lithuania, the location of two 1,500-megawatt graphite-moderated reactors, the largest of that type in the world.

Numerous Problems

According to an official resolution of the Communist Party of Lithuania broadcast from Vilnius Oct. 9, 1984, the first reactor had to be taken off line frequently during its first year of operation and construction of the second reactor fell behind schedule. In addition, the quality of construction and equipment was poor. Workers were unable to make repairs properly; many also were malingerers and some violated safety regulations while others made “irrational use” of construction material--that is, stole.

Finally, according to a September, 1985 report in Trud (Labor), joy among construction workers at the Smolensk atomic energy station, who had finished construction ahead of schedule, was short-lived. It turned out that the 1,000-megawatt plant lacked a needed transmission power line.

“What a bitter irony!” wrote staff correspondent G. Gromyko. “The chief question now is: What in the world were they thinking about in the planning and economic administration?”

Trud’s editors added: “Unfortunately this is by no means the only instance in which certain subdivisions of the Ministry of Power and Electrification have turned over new facilities for operation and filed reports of labor victory while others promptly box them in . . . because the transmission lines are not ready.”

Soothing Assurances

Despite such seemingly frank reports, however, serious discussions about reactor design, use, location and prevention of major accidents have not appeared in Soviet mass media. And despite muffled indications of public concern about nuclear safety--long before Chernobyl--the media have delivered only soothing assurances.

For example, on March 13, 1984, Anatoly P. Alexandrov, president of the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences and director of the leading Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, appeared on a Moscow television round-table discussion on nuclear energy.

“What did your (neighbors) have to say to you?” the moderator asked.

‘Well, all kinds of rumors reach them,” the academician replied. “Therefore they asked whether or not it is dangerous near our Atomic Energy Institute. But the simplest thing I could tell them was that my entire family and numerous children and grandchildren all live here too and the families of the staff live here too. We all do,” he said.

But such talk has not alleviated concern outside the Soviet Union.