Says Military Wants It Restarted Despite Structural Problems : Energy Chief Cites Pressure to Open Troubled A-Plant

The Energy Department is resisting pressure from the defense community to immediately restart its troubled weapons reactors at Savannah River as a signal that the United States will not allow its military preparedness to erode, according to Energy Secretary John S. Herrington.

Restarting the reactors now, Herrington said in an interview, would be no more than a “feel-good exercise” that would risk a damaging loss of public confidence if tests for structural cracks, still to be performed, were to force the next energy secretary to shut the facility again.

The three aging reactors at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, which were closed earlier this year for major structural and management improvements, are the government’s only source of tritium, a form of hydrogen gas used to boost the power of most nuclear weapons. Because tritium decays radioactively at a rate of 5.5% a year, it must be replenished periodically.

Doubts Groups’ Motives

While the military is pressuring him to restart the reactors promptly to avert a tritium shortage, Herrington said, a number of environmental groups appear to be seeking legal delays in restarting the reactors not so much to protect the environment as to force a reduction in U.S. nuclear weapons.

It appears, Herrington said, that “they’re talking environment but thinking unilateral disarmament.”

During an extensive conversation Wednesday in his sixth-floor office, Herrington surveyed his four-year tenure as energy secretary--a longevity record since the often-turbulent agency was created in 1977--and offered some advice to his successor, whom President-elect George Bush is expected to name as early as today.

Be prepared, he advised the new secretary, to manage the only federal agency that resembles a $25-billion-a-year industrial enterprise, one that makes everything from submarine components to nuclear weapons to intelligence satellites, while nourishing a collection of civilian and military research laboratories that are the “crown jewels” of the American scientific community.

Mediate Among Lobbies

More than that, with 27 congressional committees and subcommittees watching over the shoulder of the energy secretary, “you have to work closely with the Congress” while struggling to mediate the interests of myriad lobbies both in and out of government--coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil and environmental groups.

The leading goal of energy policy, he said, must be “to keep our options open for American energy supplies.”

“We tend to get too focused in on coal, or oil, or nuclear. The job of the secretary is to resist interest groups in Congress, and elsewhere, who want to bring us to a position where we’re top-heavy in one resource or another . . . . We must maintain a balance, and that is a very, very big challenge.”

Current front-runners for the job are said to be Lee M. Thomas, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, former Washington Gov. Daniel J. Evans and Peter T. Johnson, a former head of the Energy Department’s Bonneville Power Administration. Two former members of the House also are said to be in the running: W. Henson Moore of Louisiana and James T. Broyhill of North Carolina.

The new secretary’s first task will be to do “a lot of reading,” Herrington said, citing 120 topics of energy, research and defense policy that cross his desk. Topping the list is the urgent modernization and cleanup of the nuclear weapons production complex, which is projected to cost more than $80 billion in the next two decades.

“There’s no question that this is going to be the No. 1 problem for the new energy secretary,” he said. “I really believe that.”

Among the accomplishments Herrington, 49, counts from his four years in office--one little noticed in the current controversy over the problems of the weapons complex--is a three-year effort to catalogue the aging system’s troubles and prepare a plan for refurbishing it.

“I don’t want to throw rocks at my predecessors, because they had their own problems. But what I found was that there was no road map telling us where we were going in environmental, health and safety (issues). No one had made a list of the problems, what they were going to cost and what our corporate plan would be to fix them.”

“We’re on our way to fundamentally changing this department,” he said, “from not knowing where the road led, to a long-term strategy. We’re now putting in place a structure to deal with these problems.”

Notes Funds Increase

Although funds for environmental, health and safety improvements in dozens of Energy Department facilities declined in the early 1980s, Herrington noted, they have risen 80% since 1985 to $1.4 billion a year, and the agency’s staff in this area has grown by half.

At the same time, he said, there are pressures from some defense officials--he refused to specify whom--to declare the immediate repair mission accomplished and start Savannah River’s tritium reactors. This, he insisted, would be imprudent.

“Most of them understand that these reactors are aging, that we’re working to make them reliable, that they’ve got to run another 10 years” until replacement units can be built, he said.

“Reliable reactors usually equal the most productive reactors and the safest. But the other side of the defense equation says: ‘Start them today, we need a signal we’re still (capable of) producing.’

“We could probably do that, but I don’t think we should. We, or some other secretary, might have to shut them down again,” Herrington said, stressing that structural and management problems posed by the three reactors are “long-term problems that require long-term solutions.”

‘Feel-Good Exercise’

“You can’t engage in a feel-good exercise to start a reactor. You have to do it right, or you’re going to lose public confidence in what you’re doing.”

Herrington has continued to stick by a “spring, summer” estimate for restarting the first Savannah River unit, the K reactor, but cautions that ultrasonic testing for cracks in reactor vessels and piping has not been done yet, “and I don’t know what we’ll find” that might force further delays.

Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental groups led by the Natural Resources Defense Council has filed suit in federal district court in Washington to compel the Energy Department to write an environmental impact statement before restarting the reactors, threatening a further delay of six months to a year. Department officials have agreed to prepare a study but say that they intend to do so while the first unit is being restarted, not before.

In the interview, Herrington questioned the motives of the environmental groups, suggesting that a hidden agenda underlay their demand for further study. With more than 30 years of operating history already on the record, he said, “you know exactly what you’re dealing with” and no further study should be required.

“You have the whole gamut of 15 or 20 organizations that see this as a way to stop plutonium or tritium production in the United States,” he said. “Environment is not on their agenda . . . . The lawsuit they are coming in with is aimed at tying us up in court, to stop weapons production.”

Other Energy Department sources said that Herrington’s concerns relate in part to a coalition of nine environmental and anti-nuclear groups led by the Natural Resources Defense Council called the “Plutonium Challenge.”

In a letter to President Reagan on Nov. 5, 1987, the coalition called for a unilateral two-year halt in plutonium production to stimulate further arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. Signatories included former U.S. arms control negotiators Paul Warnke and Gerard C. Smith and former CIA Director William E. Colby.

Calls Concerns ‘Silly’

Paul J. Allen, of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Washington office, dismissed Herrington’s concerns as “silly.”

Although the group has lobbied for a comprehensive nuclear test ban and arms reductions, Allen said, the purpose of its current suit against the Energy Department is to “get them to clean up the situation” at Savannah River. “That doesn’t make us a bunch of unilateral disarmers.”