Scoffs vs. Outrage at Health Risks : Two Towns Share Flawed Nuclear Plants, Little Else

Along the perimeter of the Energy Department’s infamous nuclear weapons plant here, bright orange signs provide daily reports for the folks whose well-kept homes lie just across the street.

“Radiation: 0.017 mrs/hr,” they said the other day.

The argot--milliroentgens per hour--is well understood. Years of pride for the nuclear weapons plant have given way to horror in the wake of highly publicized revelations about years of safety violations and environmental destruction.

But the furor in Fernald is by no means the rule for Americans who live near the nation’s 17 major nuclear weapons facilities. Many communities respond with defiant support of the jobs-producing nuclear weapons complex.

In South Carolina, for example, citizens of prosperous Aiken, near the massive Savannah River Plant, scoff at reports of hazards past and future.

Viewing the current safety-related shutdown with impatience, Aiken residents denounce the plant’s critics as anti-nuke. Prominent townsfolk, angered at the way the weapons plant has been portrayed, have been drafting a “reasoned response” to “media hype.”

Bound together near the dawn of the nuclear age at the whim of the Atomic Energy Commission, Fernald and Aiken have much in common. For years they have shared in the heady exhilaration and prosperity that came with their participation in the effort to harness the mighty atom.

Now they share its consequences--tainted ground water, vast pits of nuclear waste, haunting tales of worker recklessness and incessant media attention that lump the towns together in accounts of woes and near-disaster.

For years, the Energy Department maintained that health risks at Fernald and Savannah River were confined to plant grounds, and there remains no undisputed evidence that the emissions of radiation from the facilities have adversely affected public health. But recent reports have cast doubt on earlier, sanguine views.

At the Savannah River Plant, which produces radioactive tritium for use in nuclear weapons, an emerging record of shoddy workmanship--including more than a dozen previously unreported safety mishaps--has raised concerns about the possibility of a major nuclear accident.

And at the uranium-processing plant in Fernald, the Energy Department has acknowledged that for years it permitted the emission of radiation in quantities known to be harmful to public health. The government has found that contaminated ground water, caused by the deposit of nearly 13 million pounds of nuclear waste into leaky underground storage pits, stretches up to a mile south of the plant.

But public response in the neighboring towns has diverged almost diametrically. “Aiken seems to feel safe behind a buffer zone,” said Blake Early, a Sierra Club expert on the facilities. “But in Fernald, people were hoodwinked, and they’re damn mad about it.”

Fernald’s Feed Materials Production Center, whose name misled many into thinking it made cattle feed, looms ominously over the bucolic farmland of southern Ohio. The Energy Department has decided to shut the plant within five years.

Visible Reminder

Until then, the facility, within plain view of the nearby townships of Ross and Morgan, will be a daily presence for the nearly 15,000 residents who live within five miles of it. A ring of test wells now surrounds the facility, a visible reminder of worries about contaminated ground water.

Emergency sirens are tested on the first Monday of every month, sending schoolchildren scurrying indoors. As a result of parental and legal concerns, a Girl Scout facility and a summer camp near the plant have been closed.

In Aiken, by contrast, the huge Savannah River Plant intrudes less overtly into daily life. Known to residents as the “bomb plant,” it is shrouded by acres of pine trees that shield its five reactors from public eye. Few of Aiken’s 19,000 residents have seen them.

But the imprint of the 300-square-mile complex is everywhere. Drivers who use the well-traveled Route 125 must stop at well-guarded checkpoints when the road cuts through the plant. Hunters who stalk deer in the facility’s vast wilderness must submit their prey for Geiger-counter checkups.

But few seem to mind. When the bomb plant decides to accept new job applications, it must rent space at the county fairgrounds. Despite a cleanup bill approaching $10 billion, residents eagerly await the construction of an expanded facility designed to produce tritium far into the next century.

With the nuclear weapons plants’ recent notoriety, says the Rev. William R. Johnston, a Presbyterian minister in Aiken, small-town lives have become public fodder, and the phone calls from friends and relatives seem never to cease.

“They ask: ‘How can you raise your children there? . . . Aren’t you afraid? . . . We worry about you. . . . ‘ “ Johnston said. “It makes us feel a little bit beleaguered.”

Residents’ regard for the Savannah River Plant and its longtime operator, the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., is such that the attention has provoked blunt resentment. “When the media got ahold of it,” complained Henry Hartline, a retired Savannah worker who sat sipping his coffee at Fay’s Cafe, “they just blowed it up as high as the sky.”

“You know what it is?” said Odell Weeks, Aiken’s mayor for more than 30 years. “You have anti-nuclears all over the nation. But we don’t have any anti-nuclears here. If there is, I’d like to meet him.”

Built in a frenzy in the early 1950s, after news of the first Soviet atomic bomb jolted the nation out of a postwar contentedness, the Savannah River Plant detached Aiken from a quiet past. There were farms to be relocated, a town to be moved. About 30,000 construction workers brought an unsavory side to a community known for its affluent “winter colony” and horse trainers.

But the urgency of the enterprise fed a patriotic pride. That feeling remained undiluted, residents say, even during the ‘60s and ‘70s. And now, said Sharon Procter, chairman of the school board, “you can’t help but feel a sense of awe.”

To the current criticism, resentment is the natural response.

“An awful lot of people saw themselves as working hard for something that they saw very much in terms of national defense,” said Johnston, the Presbyterian minister. “All of a sudden it is as if they are being accused of endangering the national good.”

Du Pont, residents emphasized, has always been a “good neighbor.” Its employees and their families participated in churches and civic clubs, staying in town even after retirement. The plant manager rode a lead car in the sesquicentennial parade.

Such familiarity has bred deep trust. Asked about revelations of carelessness by Du Pont and of covering up plant problems by the Energy Department, residents are disbelieving. “You have to understand,” said ground water consultant Scott Keith. “The people out there know best.”

“What you have here,” said local schools Supt. Joseph Brooks, “is a blind Bible Belt relationship that doesn’t question goodness.”

“We’re just not as pluralistic,” agreed Johnston, who is leading the group drafting the report defending Savannah River from criticism. “If there really is a danger to the community, the community just doesn’t believe it.”

A number of national organizations, including Greenpeace, have been active in their concern about potential safety hazards at Savannah River. But among Aiken residents, only retired employee Art Dexter has been outspoken. But he worries that as he criticizes the plant that provides the livelihood of so many of his neighbors, “someone just might try to even the score.”

“It works like this,” said another resident, an insurance agent who said public candor could harm his business. “The brain says: ‘Look, this is potentially disastrous.’ But the stomach says: ‘Durn, I sure do love T-bone steaks. And Du Pont sure is a fine place to work.’ I’m frustrated at Du Pont for not being perfect. But without Du Pont, I’m not perfect; I’m broke.”

Roles are reversed at Fernald, now that the trust has been shattered. Near that plant, it is defenders of the facility who tend toward silence. The critics bask in the limelight.

Their defiance was evident at a recent community meeting convened by the Energy Department and Westinghouse, which took over operation of the plant from National Lead--now known as NL Industries Inc.--two years ago.

No Voices Raised

No voices were raised. But after officials concluded an introductory briefing on environmental hazards with the request that the residents save their questions for small-group meetings later in the evening, many sputtered in frustration. “This is divide and conquer,” complained Lisa Crawford, president of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH).

Others mocked the well-dressed official whose descriptions of radiation contamination in soil and creek beds tended toward such phrases as “almost normal” and “nearly normal.” “What does that mean?” one resident asked later. “Would you buy a used car from that man?”

Confrontational tactics have emerged only recently. For most of the plant’s life, the only visible ill will toward the plant was harbored by those whose land the government confiscated to build it.

With secrecy regulations tightly enforced, curiousity dwindled. “We knew it was making atom bombs,” remembered one longtime resident, “but no one could talk about it.”

Speculation was also stifled by the plant’s small size and benign appearance. For years the factory gate was decorated with a Dutch Boy, mascot for the paint produced by National Lead. The requisite Energy Department signs appeared only halfway down an access road.

Home builders, fleeing the Cincinnati suburbs, often did not know that they had become neighbors of a nuclear plant. “Nobody knew what the plant was about,” said Gwen Robers, who moved with her husband to the area 10 years ago. “We thought it must be pet food.”

Plant employees made little impact. At shift change every day, their pickup trucks stacked up for blocks behind the only traffic light in the township of Ross. But when the light turned green, the majority headed for Cincinnati, less than 20 miles away.

“This isn’t really a community,” said Mel Karnes, a longtime area resident and Fernald employee who has spent time also at the Savannah River Plant. “Aiken is in the valley between the mountains and is a community unto itself. Here, it’s just farms and townships.”

The early complacency, however, has long since been jarred. After reports four years ago that dangerous nuclear wastes lurked beneath the plant and that airborne radiation had spread beyond it, Fernald seemed far less benign.

Past funerals suddenly took on a new light. Residents began to compile lists of neighbors whose health had turned bad. A study revealed that cancer incidence was higher than normal. Residents began to scoff at the advice not to worry because radioactive uranium particles, heavier than air, would tumble to earth before crossing the plant’s boundaries.

“The complexion of Fernald just changed dramatically,” said David Day, president of a union representing workers at the plant.

At first, remembered Crawford, the FRESH president, “it was an uphill struggle.” Tensions mounted as the 14,000 residents nearest the plant filed a class-action suit against former plant operator National Lead, seeking $300 million in damages for emotional stress and depreciation to property values.

“We put a terrible crimp in the daily lives and the money flow of this community,” acknowledged Marvin Clausen, a vocal opponent. “It really hurt their pocketbook.”

Health Department Inundated

But the anxiety level continued to rise. At the Crosby County Health Department, said Acting Commissioner Larry McGraw, “we were inundated. At least half the people out there have called at one time or another with questions about their drinking water. It’s been a scary time.”

The plant’s remaining overt support dissipated late last summer, when the government publicly conceded that it had permitted the release of radioactive emissions in quantities known to be harmful to human health. “Everything just broke loose,” said resident Bernice Thompson.

The White House, citing “public perception” problems, recommended that the plant be closed by the early 1990s. So deep-seated is the distrust, however, that some in Fernald voice concerns that the government will give cleanup a low priority once the plant is closed.

“There is concern that those best able to deal with the problem we have--namely, a serious cleanup effort of uncertain proportions--are going to be lost,” Ohio Gov. Richard F. Celeste said in a recent interview.

In Aiken, by contrast, the only expressed anxiety concerns the imminent departure of Du Pont and the takeover of the plant by Westinghouse. “What we want to know,” said Murff, “is whether Westinghouse will be a good neighbor.”

For local politicians and businessmen alike, it has been cause for delight that the company’s primary task will be to manage the construction of a new tritium-producing reactor, moving Aiken into a new century of nuclear bomb building.

“When I heard the news,” said restaurant owner Sam Erb, “I came back and cracked open a bottle of champagne. . . . Nothing could be better for Aiken.”

Tale of Two Cities Contamination from federal atomic weapons facilities affects two towns differently:

In Fernald, the citizens are outraged. The plant will be shut down in five years.

In Aiken, residents defend the plant operators, and eagerly await an expansion of the facility.