Atomic Plant Cleanup Funds Sought : Critics Say Reagan Request for $900 Million Is Insufficient

President Reagan will seek $900 million to begin cleaning up the nation’s nuclear weapons production facilities in the budget he is scheduled to submit next month and will suggest that the Energy Department spend $150 million for emergency work this fiscal year, the White House announced Tuesday.

“This is a good beginning. We’ll keep the plants operating,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, disclosing the initial scope of the government’s effort to reverse problems that have been building in the weapons plants for more than two decades.

However, the amount for the immediate work is far less than what was sought by the Energy Department, which had initially requested $360 million for the effort.

‘A Weak Beginning’

“It sounds like a weak beginning in dealing with the problem,” charged Leonard Weiss, the staff director of the Senate Government Operations Committee. “We realize there are budget constraints here, but we’re facing a problem that won’t go away.”

Weiss, anticipating an eventual cost of $5 billion to $6 billion a year for 30 years to rectify the safety and waste problems only recently disclosed in the nation’s nuclear weapons industry, said: “You wonder what $900 million is going to buy.”

Reagan will submit his budget proposal in early January, two weeks before leaving office. Critics of the government’s handling of serious safety problems in the production facilities are expected to press the incoming Bush Administration to revise the request. But competition for the funds will be stiff, even within the Energy Department, and it is uncertain whether there will be significant pressure from within the government to increase the cleanup money.

Energy Secretary John S. Herrington has estimated that the overall cost of cleaning up contaminated sites, disposing of accumulated radioactive wastes and modernizing the facilities--some of which are more than 30 years old--would exceed $150 billion.

All told, an Energy Department survey of pollution at nuclear weapons facilities has turned up 155 separate problems of environmental contamination, most involving toxic industrial chemicals, not radiation. Twelve of the contaminated sites are in Northern California at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the adjacent Sandia Livermore facility.

Safety concerns have forced the closing of all three tritium and plutonium production reactors at the department’s Savannah River Production complex in South Carolina. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen gas that is used in nuclear weapons and plutonium is a highly radioactive element used in nuclear weapons and as a reactor fuel.

Fitzwater said the department’s request for $360 million in a supplemental appropriation was rejected by the White House as “basically too little, too late” because the money would probably not be available until September or October. As a supplemental appropriation, it could not be spent until the funding was approved by Congress.

Rather, the spokesman said, it was decided at the White House that the department would be authorized to spend $150 million of about $900 million in fiscal 1989 funds that were set aside for other programs but will not be spent for the original purposes as a result of canceled projects or costs that have been lower than anticipated.

This money, he said, “can be used immediately to begin whatever work is necessary to improve the safety conditions at these plants. . . . We thought it was crucial to get this money on the project early.”

The White House spokesman said the $900 million would be divided evenly among safety projects, environmental cleanup and construction.

“The fact is, it’s a very small step. And we’re talking billions of dollars over many, many years. These problems developed over 20, 30 years, and by the time all the construction is completed and all the planning is done, it’s going to be perhaps a like number of years before everything is rectified,” Fitzwater said.

But Thomas Cochran, senior staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “A billion dollars in the budget says you’re looking at a 100-year cleanup.”

In addition, he said, the cost of cleaning up existing problems may not leave much money for construction of new reactors needed to safely produce the fuel for the nuclear weapons. “You can eat up money real quickly just trying to clean up those reactors,” Cochran said.