Soviet Disaster Fallout: a Hot Debate in the U.S.

Amid a peaceful setting of marshy flats and rolling hills thickly forested with pine and oak, three nuclear reactors at the Savannah River Plant near here work day and night producing most of the material needed to give U.S. bombs and missiles the explosive force of nuclear energy.

For the most part, the plants toil in near obscurity. The only serious controversy in the 33 years since the first reactor here began operating occurred in 1983 when the Department of Energy moved to restart one of the reactors after a 15-year shutdown. Anti-nuclear scientists and activists argued without success that it would be unsafe to start the reactor unless it was first enclosed in a full-scale concrete containment dome.

A National Debate

But now, as physicists and laymen the world over ponder the consequences of the Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the Savannah River Plant has become part of a national debate on the wisdom of operating nuclear reactors without containment domes, as was done at Chernobyl.

These reactors, on the banks of the Savannah River 160 miles east of Atlanta, are among eight managed by the U.S. Department of Energy for military or research purposes that do not have the massive containment structures that typify commercial nuclear reactors in the United States.

Instead, the South Carolina reactors, which are cooled by water and operate at low pressures and low temperatures, are contained in steel vessels surrounded on the sides and bottom by concrete eight feet thick. If radioactive particles escape this vessel, either in an explosion or through the top of the core, which is not covered by concrete, filters in the surrounding confinement building are designed to catch them.

Difference of Opinion

Government officials insist that the reactors do not need concrete domes because they operate at much lower pressures and temperatures than their commercial counterparts and thus an accident--such as a ruptured steam line--is much less likely to lead to a catastrophic meltdown. But critics contend that without the domes, the Savannah plant’s reactors lack an essential layer of protection needed to keep deadly radioactivity from reaching the atmosphere in a serious accident.

The government estimates that it would cost about $1 billion each to install containment domes on the reactors here. Moreover, the reactors might require major redesign to conform to dome construction.

Of the other government-owned reactors without domes, one at Hanford, Wash., is already undergoing special reviews by Congress and the Department of Energy, and three research reactors in Tennessee and Idaho are considered too small to be a serious threat to the public’s health, even in the worst accident imaginable.

At Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb was produced, the government runs two small reactors for medical, industrial and nuclear physics research. Another reactor at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, near Idaho Falls, is used to test new nuclear fuels and coolant before they are used by the Navy or the nuclear industry.

Limited Material

These three low-pressure reactors--all less than one-tenth as powerful as modern commercial reactors--do not have enough nuclear material within them to produce a Chernobyl-type disaster, officials said. Even if contaminated materials were released from the reactor cores, the concrete-block structures and their filtration systems are considered sufficient to prevent almost all of the radioactivity from reaching the atmosphere.

But these small research reactors pale in comparison to both the size and the scope of the work being done at Savannah River, where a cluster of large nuclear reactors--each spaced at least two miles apart--supply most of the plutonium and all of the tritium for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal, from bombs to missile and artillery warheads.

The reactors ultimately produce plutonium discs, about the size of hockey pucks, that are shipped to a weapons fabricating facility at Rocky Flats, Colo.

Plutonium Output

Just how much plutonium is produced at the Savannah plant is classified, officials here said. However, David Albright, a physicist with the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based weapons monitoring group, estimated that with just three reactors operating around the clock, the Savannah operation in one year is capable of producing plutonium equal to about 1% of the nation’s stockpile.

Managed for the government by E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., the reactors at the site are designated simply by letters of the alphabet--L, K, P, C and R. Of these five, three are operating now and one was taken out of service in 1964 and remains shut down.

The other, C Reactor, was shut down a year ago so workers could patch pin-sized holes in the reactor core vessel, through which minute amounts of the element tritium had escaped into the reactor’s confinement building and through its stack into the atmosphere. Plant operators say the problem poses “no significant safety concern” and they expect to have Reactor C back in operation by the end of this year.

The safety record for all the Savannah reactors has been good. According to Department of Energy records and internal reports, and statements of the plant operators themselves, there has never been a serious accident at the plant or a release of significant amounts of radioactivity.

Mishap Claimed

Anti-nuclear activists, however, contend that there was an accident at the plant in March, 1955, in which large amounts of radioactivity were released into the atmosphere.

Last year, Robert Alvarez, director of the Nuclear Weapons and Power Project of the Environmental Policy Center in Washington, published a paper in the Journal of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences charging that a major nuclear reactor accident took place at the Savannah site on March 14, 1955.

High concentrations of radioactive contamination were recorded on that day near the reactors, according to site records. But plant officials attributed the cause to a test explosion of a four-kiloton device 2,000 miles to the west at the government’s Nevada Test Site two days earlier.

Now, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond has asked fellow Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to send a member of his staff to the Savannah plant to resolve the controversy once and for all.

Critics’ Argument

Regardless of the plant’s safety record so far, critics argue that without domes, the reactors are as unsafe as Chernobyl--whatever their record up to now might be.

“Their argument that the odds are so long against a full core meltdown must have been the same argument the Soviets used and believed,” asserted Thomas B. Cochran, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog group. “The Soviets sorely regret that decision today.”

Art Dexter, a physicist who retired from the Savannah plant in 1981 after working there for 30 years, said in an interview that the Department of Energy’s belief that only 3% of the reactor fuel could melt in the worst possible accident--the underlying assumption of all the department’s safety planning--is flatly wrong. Even at the low pressures under which the reactors run, a miscalculation in fuel handling or mixing could cause a fire or explosion, he said.

A ‘Non-System’

Savannah’s confinement system, Dexter charged, is a “non-system.”

But the nuclear engineers who run Savannah say their reactors are safe enough without full-scale containment domes, even though the Savannah reactors contain within their cores as much radioactive material as many commercial reactors, such as San Onofre’s Unit 1 near San Clemente.

The Savannah reactors operate at about 240 degrees Fahrenheit and 5 pounds of pressure per square inch, compared to the 600 degrees and 2,200 pounds per square inch required to produce electricity in modern commercial reactors.

“Our facilities are very, very safe, and we’re confident the risk is very, very small,” said Charles Payne, a senior nuclear engineer for the Department of Energy. “We can’t have a (meltdown)” such as the one that occurred in the Soviet Union,” he said.

New Reactor Shelved

Still, a tentative proposal for a new, more powerful reactor at Savannah put forward in 1983 included plans for a full containment dome much like those that cover commercial reactors. The dome, the plans said, would “provide an essentially leak-tight barrier against the uncontrolled release of radioactivity to the environment.” The plans were shelved after the plant’s L Reactor was restarted.

Payne said the containment dome was considered in that conceptual design not because it was safer, but because government officials knew that scientists and environmentalists would mobilize to stop construction of a new reactor if it included only a “confinement building” without a containment dome.

“We’re having a lot of trouble convincing people that containment and confinement are equivalent,” Payne said. “It would have been easier to just design it in there and avoid the controversy.”