Energy Dept. Preparing to Restart 3 Savannah River Reactors in 1989

The Energy Department expects to have all three of its nuclear-weapons reactors at Savannah River in South Carolina running by the end of next year and will set a firm timetable this week for restarting the first unit, senior officials said Friday.

The department expects to restart the plant’s K-reactor, which produces tritium gas for nuclear weapons, before long-term safety improvements are complete. The three aging reactors were shut earlier this year as the department began dealing with long-neglected problems of maintenance and management that had led to safety concerns.

The shutdown, however, has led to new fears that a shortage of tritium gas, which decays radioactively and must be replenished periodically in nuclear weapons, may impair the nation’s nuclear deterrent--a concern disputed by some senior officials as well as independent arms control analysts.

In an interview Friday, Joseph F. Salgado, deputy secretary of energy, said improvements of management and equipment at Savannah River necessarily will continue over the remaining 10- to 12-year operating life of the plant’s three production reactors. But he said the agency is determined to run the reactors with an adequate margin of safety, following the advice--for the first time in its history--of a panel of independent experts.

Denies Safety Charge

“People say we’re starting this up for national security reasons and abrogating any safety concerns,” Salgado said. “That’s not true. We’re taking a look at what we need to do to start up, what we feel we should be doing to improve these reactors, and what we’d like to do” over their operating life.

At the same time, Troy Wade, the assistant energy secretary for defense, told reporters during a conference in Cambridge, Mass., on Friday that national security requires restarting one of Savannah River’s three tritium-producing reactors by mid-summer. Wade, among other officials, said that the agency expects the remaining two units to be running by the end of next year.

“Our goal is to assure the supply of tritium to the U.S. stockpile through continued production at Savannah River,” Wade told an audience of arms control and environmental specialists.

To ensure safe operation, Wade and other senior department officials said, the K-reactor will be run at less than full power until the agency’s safety advisory panel is satisfied that the 35-year-old reactor is at least as safe to operate at full power as a commercial nuclear power plant.

A key factor in the start-up that is still to be decided is the reactor’s initial power level, officials noted. A higher power level raises the output of tritium but also increases the potential severity of an accident. Salgado declined to say what power level would be appropriate, but Wade said he believes that the K-reactor probably will be held initially to 50% of maximum output--the same level in force when it was shut down last April.

Dispute Urgency

Several participants in the Cambridge conference disputed the urgency that Wade attached to rebuilding the nation’s tritium supply.

“We are dealing with a shibboleth here,” said Paul Leventhal, of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private arms control organization. “The notion that the tritium shortage is tantamount to unilateral disarmament is simply wrong.”

A senior aide to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee concurred, maintaining that any shortage of tritium--which boosts the power of nuclear weapons--might affect the pace of future deployments, but not existing weapons.

“The whole thing has been overblown,” said the aide, who asked not to be named. “There is no concern regarding our existent nuclear forces.”

Salgado said in an interview in Washington that the department has divided necessary management and hardware improvements at Savannah River into short-, medium- and long-term tasks, some of which will continue over the remaining 10- to 12-year operating life of the three reactors.

In October, the department said that it expected to restart the K-reactor this month, but recently officials said that the date has now slipped to mid-summer.

Other officials noted that new earthquake-resistant bracing is unlikely to be finished before summer, and that the agency--which is changing operating contractors from Du Pont to Westinghouse--is still working out “acceptance criteria” by which the quality of reactor management and operating safety are to be measured.

“This isn’t like screwing in a light bulb and turning on the light. We’re dealing with nuclear power. In particular, we’re dealing with 35-year-old reactors,” Salgado said.

“It isn’t like you go to the hardware store and pick up something and say this is how you fix it . . . .”

Seeking More Money

The Energy Department is now scrambling to find an additional $200 million to finance urgent safety improvements on the Savannah River reactors. But officials insisted Friday that none of the money would be diverted from other environmental, health or safety programs.

The search for a way to pay for emergency repairs at the aging Savannah River complex follows a White House refusal to commit additional money to repairs this year, reportedly to avoid exceeding spending limits set by the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law.

About 90% of the money, one department source said, would be obtained through “prefinancing,” a budgeting technique resembling a line of credit to contractors that in effect borrows on future congressional funding.

(The Washington Post said in today’s editions that the Energy Department has recommended to the White House that the nation spend $50 billion in the next 20 years to relocate two plutonium-related activities, build five new production reactors, including a large reactor at Savannah River, and clean up the worst of the environmental damage caused by four decades of bomb production.

(Quoting Reagan Administration sources, the newspaper said a blueprint for the future of the nuclear-weapons complex is scheduled to be forwarded to the Senate and House Armed Services committees Thursday but that the report is likely to be held up for several weeks because of a dispute between the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget over the high costs.)

Robert Gillette reported from Washington and Douglas Jehl from Cambridge, Mass.