Contamination High at 7 A-Arms Plants

Ground water under at least seven nuclear weapons plants is contaminated with high concentrations of chemicals, radioactive material or both, congressional investigators said Thursday.

“In some cases, solvent contamination exceeds proposed drinking water standards by a factor of 1,000 or more. In other cases, the radioactive material in the ground water is more than 400 times greater than the drinking water standards,” a report by the General Accounting Office said of conditions at nine plants and laboratories.

The GAO reviewed the Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, Ohio; the Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg, Ohio; the Savannah River fuel fabrication plant and reprocessing plants in South Carolina; the nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant near Richland, Wash.; the Rocky Flats fabrication plant near Denver; the Y-12 uranium separation and materials fabrication plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

It found no contamination exceeding drinking water standards at Mound or Los Alamos.

No Health Threat Posed

The report quoted the Energy Department, which owns the plants, as saying the contamination poses no threat to public health because it is generally confined within plant boundaries or quickly becomes diluted or dissipated if it has migrated away from the plants. Many instances of the contamination have been disclosed before.

The department has more than 50 installations. Not all handle nuclear materials.

Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), a member of the Senate Governmental Affairs nuclear proliferation subcommittee, called the information “shocking and frightening.”

“What these figures show is that the Department of Energy and its predecessors have been carrying out their mission to produce nuclear weapons with an attitude of neglect bordering on contempt for environmental protection,” said Glenn, who released the report.

In the only instances of contamination of drinking water supplies, the report said an off-site drinking well at Fernald is contaminated with uranium, an on-site drinking well is tainted with tritium at the Washington state plants and two on-site drinking wells at the South Carolina facilities are contaminated with solvents.

Elevated Plutonium Levels

The GAO said elevated levels of plutonium in soil have been found at the Mound, Rocky Flats and Savannah River reprocessing plants, and soil under some waste tanks at the Washington reprocessing plant has become radioactive.

In general, the department has acted to eliminate or reduce the sources of contamination and has undertaken cleanup projects to lower the level of contamination, the report said.

The GAO said it could cost more than $1 billion to bring the plants into full compliance with environmental laws and get the necessary permits.