U.S. A-Reactor Plans ‘Unrealistic,’ Panel Is Told

The Energy Department gave Congress “improper and unrealistic” estimates of the cost of building new military reactors in South Carolina and Idaho, federal auditors told House panel members Wednesday.

Officials of the General Accounting Office also said the department had understated the time it would take to complete the reactors, which the Bush Administration says can be in operation within 10 years for $6.8 billion.

In testimony before a special panel of the House Armed Services Committee, J. Dexter Peach, the GAO’s assistant comptroller general, raised doubts about other key aspects of the Administration’s plan, which was announced last August. The Administration is seeking $300 million in next year’s budget for design work.

Sought as Replacements

The reactors would produce tritium, a radioactive gas used to make nuclear warheads. One is to be built at the department’s Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., and the other would be at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, near Idaho Falls. The department wants them in production by 1998 as replacements for three 35-year-old Savannah River reactors that have been shut down for repairs.

Peach said recent breakdowns at the existing Savannah River reactors, which are the nation’s only source of tritium, make the need for new reactors “more acute,” but he raised doubts about new technology to be used at the new plants.

He also questioned the Energy Department’s cost calculations for the 18 different options it considered. He said the department had taken cost estimates for full-sized reactors and “scaled them down” for use in figuring the cost of smaller reactors.

“In our judgment, DOE’s scaling assumptions were not realistic and resulted in improper and unrealistic cost estimates for the various options,” he said.

The GAO says it would take at least 12 1/2 years to get a heavy-water reactor into production at Savannah River and 16 years to begin tritium output at a modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor proposed for the Idaho site. It disputed the department’s $6.8-billion cost estimate for the reactors but gave no estimate of its own.