ENERGY BRIEFING

SECURITY: A massive study of security at the U.S. Department of Energy’s laboratories and weapons complexes produced 300 recommendations for improvements but concluded that there are no “bleeding wounds” endangering national security.

One of the chief findings was not one of laxity, but of an overly cumbersome clearance process. Employees from one laboratory are unable to gain access routinely to identical facilities at another site. On average, it takes more than a year for a new employee, such as a scientist or engineer just graduated from a university, to get his first security clearance.

As a result, highly trained new people go into what amounts to a “leper colony” for more than a year, said retired Army Maj. Gen. James E. Freeze, who chaired the security task force.

In general, Freeze said, the task force found physical security at sensitive installations improved in recent years. But he said a visit to the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver, which is closed while authorities try to clean up massive plutonium contamination at the site, “caused us to have an apoplectic seizure.”

While the study found the laboratory’s accountability for nuclear material “a good program in search of excellence,” it said that failure to account for all classified documents has created a condition still deemed unsatisfactory.

POLL: Survey results to be released in Washington later this week are expected to show that two-thirds of Americans believe the nation is facing an energy crisis comparable to that of the 1970s.

The survey, by pollsters who worked for both the George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis presidential campaigns, also found that a majority believes the deployment of U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf was aimed at securing the oil supplies of the region rather than at liberating Kuwait or eliminating the menace of Iraqi chemical and nuclear warfare.

Some 80% of those questioned said they favor raising automobile fuel efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon by the year 2000 from the present 27.5 miles per gallon. A bill requiring just that was introduced in the Senate last year by Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.), but was defeated 57 to 42 after the Bush Administration waged an intensive campaign against it. The vote came about a month after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bryan is expected to introduce a similar measure later this year.

The new poll, to be released on Friday, was sponsored by the Alliance to Save Energy, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Communications Consortium.

CONTRACT: The Energy Department has awarded General Atomics of San Diego a two-year, $15.7-million contract to make targets for fusion research at laboratories in California, New Mexico and New York. The company will develop, certify and produce glass and plastic containers for deuterium and tritium fuels, which will be bombarded by laser and ion beams in fusion studies.

Fusion reactions offer the potential of virtually unlimited, cheap power without the radioactivity hazards posed by fission processes that use uranium or plutonium.

The department’s main research efforts are conducted at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, at the Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories in New Mexico, the Laser Energetics lab at the University of Rochester in New York and the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland.