Du Pont Hid A-Plant Flaws, U.S. Indicates

Investigators for the Energy Department have found new evidence that Du Pont has consistently failed to reveal the full extent of structural and maintenance problems at the troubled Savannah River nuclear weapons plant, agency officials said Wednesday.

The officials, who asked not be to named, said it appears that the 1987 decision of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. to end its 38-year management of the South Carolina facility under a government contract stemmed from a realization that accumulated problems eventually would embroil the company in a major controversy over the safety of the plant--but that Du Pont said nothing about this concern to federal officials at the time.

Senior Du Pont executives discussed the firm’s intention not to renew its operating contract, these officials said, in an Oct. 29, 1987, meeting with then-White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. Du Pont cited several reasons for wanting to pull out of Savannah River, they said, but these did not include the deteriorating condition of the plant’s three weapons production reactors. Du Pont Board Chairman Richard E. Heckert was among the officials who attended.

In a second meeting, on Feb. 7, 1988, Heckert met with Baker and Energy Secretary John S. Herrington at the White House to talk about Du Pont’s reasons for withdrawing from Savannah River but again avoided the topic of the plant’s condition, sources said.

It was at this meeting, they added, that Du Pont demanded $75 million in federal funds for severence pay for its 6,500 employees, although all but 37 would continue in their jobs under a new contractor.

Clint Archer, a spokesman for Du Pont at the firm’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del., confirmed that the October meeting had taken place but said the company would not comment on any discussions with federal officials.

“It now appears they had a pretty good idea of what was waiting down the road,” said one official familiar with the Energy Department investigation.

Source of Tritium

The plant’s three aging reactors, which were closed earlier this year for major structural improvements and managerial changes, are the government’s only source of tritium, a perishable form of hydrogen gas that must be replenished periodically in most nuclear weapons.

Some Pentagon and Energy Department officials have voiced concern that, if the reactors are not restarted next year, the United States may have difficulty maintaining its nuclear weapons stockpile.

Energy Department officials said the growing conviction that Du Pont knew more about the problems of the Savannah River reactors than it was telling the government stems in part from a visit to the plant last week by the agency’s inspector general, John C. Layton.

Herrington ordered Layton’s unusual visit to determine why Du Pont had waited eight months--from April to mid-December--to tell the department about cracks it had found in a section of pipe that technicians had removed from the L reactor in October, 1987.

Although Layton has not yet sent a formal report of his findings to Herrington, sources said that his investigation found evidence of “more problems” that could further delay restarting the reactors, as well as indications that Du Pont was aware in 1987 of the potential controversy that awaited its management of the plant. The sources refused to describe these problems or to say what effect they might have on the K reactor, the first unit scheduled to be restarted.

No Firm Timetable

Herrington said last week that he still believed it was possible to begin low-power operation of the K reactor by spring or summer; but he hedged his position by noting that no firm timetable could be set until ultrasonic inspections of the reactor’s cooling system and steel vessel are completed.

Concern that Du Pont was not fully informing the Energy Department about the scope of structural problems in the three reactors, all of them more than 30 years old, was heightened by the discovery earlier this month of an internal company memo at Savannah River discussing cracks in the L reactor pipe, which Du Pont had just reported to the department.

The memo, dated April 19, makes clear that Du Pont knew about the stress corrosion crack in a piece of 16-inch stainless steel pipe long before it told the Energy Department. The April memo notes that, after 38 years at Savannah River, Du Pont was just beginning to compile “an accurate and complete history of leaks from the reactors since the first day.”

Early findings, it adds, show that “significant numbers” of stress-corrosion cracks have occurred in large-diameter pipes in the reactors’ main cooling systems as well as in smaller, subsidiary cooling systems. It says also that fatigue cracks “probably due to normal system vibrations” have been found in the junctions between large and small coolant pipes.

About one-third of the cracks in main cooling pipes are attributed to “flame-washing” the metal during installation, a technique of heating the pipes to help bend them into position. This practice has long been forbidden in commercial nuclear power plants explicitly because it can induce weaknesses that could lead to a loss-of-coolant accident.

Cliff Webb, a Du Pont spokesman at Savannah River, said that the memo was intended only as an “informal communication” between a company researcher and his supervisor, although he acknowledged that it raised a “reporting issue” with the department on an important safety issue.

‘Poorly Maintained’

More than a year ago, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences issued a report describing the Savannah River reactors as “poorly maintained and modernized.” Amid signs that they were nearing the end of their useful life, the report said, the reactors would require “extraordinary maintenance efforts.”

The academy put much of the blame, however, on the Energy Department and its predecessor agencies for failing to exercise adequate supervision of Du Pont over a 15-year period.

Energy Secretary Herrington had requested the academy study in May, 1986, two weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. By that August, a panel of academy experts was at work, analyzing dozens of internal Du Pont memos on the operating history of the reactors and their maintenance.

Department officials said it now appears that Du Pont was engaged in much the same exercise to determine what the academy might find. Five months later, in February, 1987, the company told the department and the White House that it was not inclined to renew its operating contract, which expires in 1989.

In October, 1987--only days before the National Academy of Sciences issued its scathing report-- Du Pont formally announced its intent to pull out of Savannah River.

3 Reasons Cited

The company cited three reasons: It was no longer uniquely qualified to run the plant, the government seemed less willing than in years past to offer “total protection from liability” for damages stemming from plant operations and Du Pont noted what it called “the increasingly controversial nature of the assignment and the escalating criticism” of companies involved in nuclear weapons production.

“We expect this trend to accelerate in the years ahead,” Du Pont Chairman Heckert said in a fall, 1987, notice to Savannah River employees.

One Energy Department official familiar with the findings of the agency’s inspector general said that, in retrospect, this prescience seems to have been based on a better understanding of safety problems at Savannah River than the company had conveyed to the department.

The Westinghouse Corp. is to take over management of the plant and its 6,500 employees in April.