Plan to Expand Nuclear Arms Plant Divides Texas City : Weapons: Talk of plutonium processing at the Pantex facility raises fears of contamination of water supplies. Proponents see potential for jobs.

Phil Smith never gave much thought to the Pantex plant next to his ranch. There never seemed any need.

True enough, it is the only place in the United States where atomic bombs are assembled, which might have given him pause to ponder. But the plant had been a good neighbor all these years. It employed a lot of people. Never did anybody any harm that he knew of.

Now, there were times when a bunch of the ranchers would get together for a beer or two, and they’d jaw on about how the government had taken the land on short notice back in ’42 and wouldn’t even let them harvest the wheat. And the Roman Catholic bishop had urged Pantex workers to resign 10 years ago on the grounds that work out there was immoral.

But that was pretty much history. The plant had become part of the landscape, first as a conventional weapons factory during World War II, then as a nuclear assembly plant in 1951.

And things probably would have stayed that way--with only the folks from the Peace Farm demonstrating daily outside the Pantex gates--were it not for the plan by the Department of Energy, released last January, to “reconfigure” the whole weapons system.

That plan has engulfed this Texas Panhandle community of 160,000 in turmoil, brought on by the possibility of moving other nuclear facilities to Pantex--specifically, functions performed by the troubled Rocky Flats complex just outside Denver, such as plutonium processing. People of like minds in most all things now find themselves on opposite sides of the street on this one.

Smith and others like him are against any kind of move until they know exactly what would be brought here. They are the self-admitted underdogs.

On the other side is the mayor and other civic leaders who see a fortune in government money and thousands of much-needed jobs coming to Amarillo, which has suffered through some brutal times with the rest of the Oil Patch. They are willing to trust the DOE, despite a string of disclosures in recent years about massive nuclear waste and contamination problems at weapons sites around the country--much of it in the West. Cleaning them up will take at least three decades and billions of dollars, if it is ever done at all.

The fight is about water, as precious as gold on these high plains. It is no coincidence that the people who most sharply question an addition to the Pantex plant are farmers and ranchers who need clean underground water for their crops and cattle. Not only do they say a Pantex expansion could imperil the massive Ogallala aquifer if there were a radioactive accident, but that some additional programs would use millions of gallons of water a day from the subsurface lake.

It is, as well, a story of fear. City officials warn that the weapons plant could be closed and moved elsewhere if it is not a willing participant in the reconfiguration. Opponents say that kind of talk is designed to scare Amarillo residents into going along with the expansion, lest the city’s second-largest employer move someplace else. The city officials, meanwhile, claim that the opponents to the expansion are using scare tactics of their own, predicting nuclear doom when there is nothing to back it up.

Finally, it is the kind of story that tells how far the Department of Energy must go to regain its reputation, despite the new openness policy of its present director, James D. Watkins. Once it was the darling of federal agencies, with almost total power to do what it wanted in secrecy. And now that the legacy of that secrecy has unfolded, the DOE stirs controversy wherever it goes, whatever it does. Amarillo is no exception.

Mayor Keith Adams positively bristles at the very notion that the past has anything to do with the future. So what if the DOE has had accidents in the past. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.

“It’s important to put it in context,” he said in a recent interview. “You can’t use their track record as an argument to be against them in the future.”

Adams and others contend that the problems of the nuclear weapons industry date so far back that it is unfair to use past practices as an example of what might happen if, for instance, Pantex begins processing plutonium.

Two of the city’s most prominent residents, lawyers Wales Madden Jr. and Jerome Johnson, took on the task of chairing the Pantex Expansion Task Force, also known as Panhandle 2000.

Johnson said that after a visit to the Rocky Flats complex, along with a number of other city officials, his fears about increased danger were allayed. He also said the DOE’s decision to consolidate just made good sense, given the weapons complex’s inefficiency and environmental problems over the years.

“They are saying, ‘We need to look at the whole thing, downsize it, make it safer and save money,’ ” he said. “I think the people here believe the redistribution of nuclear facilities can be done safely and that they will be monitored more than anything else in the history of mankind.”

Johnson also said that the DOE is now forced to be more open, which made it much easier to keep an eye on what is going on inside the nuclear weapons assembly plant.

Yet that new openness also is resulting in new, unsettling findings. A report issued last April by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that Pantex itself had been guilty of recent safety violations. Among them were the exposure of workers to uranium dust and the failure of the plant to complete safety analysis reports that should have been done years ago. The GAO went so far as to say Pantex had one of the worst occupational safety records in the DOE weapons complex.

Still, Adams is adamant that there will be no problem. He also said that the benefit to the city would be beyond anything that had come before.

“It would probably be the single biggest economic event in the city’s history,” Adams said.

To that end, the city has spent thousands of dollars pushing for the expansion of the 16,000-acre site, which sits amid Panhandle farmland. Over the years, about 20,000 nuclear weapons have been assembled there and thousands more taken apart as they have become obsolete or been replaced.

The local newspaper has endorsed the expansion wholeheartedly. The politicians have lined up behind it. School boards and city councils around the state--even as far away as coastal Corpus Christi--have signed proclamations giving their support.

But it was also one of those proclamations that caused cattleman Bill O’Brien to take a stand against the Pantex expansion.

By his reckoning, this is the first political thing he has done in his life. It’s the first time he can remember having his name in the newspaper since he was “a teen-ager for things I shouldn’t have been doing.”

Not that O’Brien isn’t well-known around town. He is the managing partner of Texas Beef Group, a multimillion-dollar operation that runs thousands of head of cattle on 15 ranches in the Panhandle. His family has been there for generations. His wife, Alice, is the president of the Amarillo school board.

And so it happened that at one school board meeting several months ago, a proclamation was presented in support of the Pantex plant expansion. The only one who would not sign it was Alice O’Brien, who had misgivings about bringing more nuclear facilities to the Panhandle. She went home that evening and told her husband about what had happened.

“They were voting for jobs,” said O’Brien. “They were voting from a sense of duty. They were being a part of the team.”

O’Brien, who had been watching from the wings through all the early hoopla of the city’s Pantex campaign, decided that night that no one else was going to come forward and speak for those who had serious doubts about the plant expansion.

“I decided I would have to take this thing up,” he said. “When you talked to these government entities, they didn’t talk about plutonium processing and how it’s been bad wherever it’s been done. They feature all the economic benefits.

“In the legal profession, it is called due diligence. In the home with the kids, they call it homework. In the business world, we call it checking it out. We look before we leap,” he said.

What bothered O’Brien the most was that there didn’t seem to be any questioning on the part of the city about what might go on the Pantex compound. There seemed, instead, to be a blanket acceptance that the Energy Department could do whatever it wished so long as it gave assurances that it would be safe. He calls that approach the “blind faith theory.”

So on April 1, O’Brien created a group called Operation Commonsense by mailing a statement to the media and 200 influential people around Amarillo.

“We are not against the Pantex project,” he wrote. “We are against the unqualified and unconditional endorsement of a DOE project of which we know nothing except that they claim it will be safe.”

He went on to say that the Pantex expansion could be in the best interest of Amarillo, but the decision “will not be made based on trust of the DOE and faith that they will do it right.”

Since then, O’Brien has been passing out reading material to anyone he can find--newspaper articles and other documents about the hazards of such things as storing nuclear waste.

As might be expected, O’Brien and the mayor are not exactly on the same wavelength.

“He’s taken it on as a cause,” Adams said of O’Brien. “He won’t admit it, but I think he’s anti-nuclear. I think people should question what’s going on, but I think Bill is looking at it from a very narrow viewpoint.”

Johnson, of the Panhandle 2000 group, said: “We don’t want it if it can’t be done safely so far as people and the environment are concerned.” But that concern doesn’t stop promoters of the plant expansion because there is security in knowing that “the DOE is never going to be able to hide anything anymore,” he said.

Phil and Doris Smith’s place is called the Sunshine Ranch. On a hot, windy afternoon in late June, they were sitting on their front porch, which is encased in windows, telling about the evolution of their involvement with the Pantex plant.

In the next room, their entire dining room table was filled with printed material that they, like O’Brien, were distributing to anyone who would read it.

As they were talking, Charles Addis, a neighbor, dropped by. So did C. E. Williams and Frank Wink and his boy, Jim. Then Beverly Gattis of STAND (Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping) pulled up out front and so did another neighbor, Jeri Osborne. Soon the porch was filled with people, most of them from nearby farms and ranches, who had joined the cause of protesting a blanket endorsement of a Pantex expansion.

“We’ve accomplished a great deal already,” Smith said. “We’ve raised the curiosity of people who normally wouldn’t care. Plus, if it does come to pass, we’ve made enough of a stink so that the legislative people are going to have to say that it has to be done safely with lots of oversight.”

These, too, are people the mayor thinks are using scare tactics because these are the ones who have been asking about what might happen to the water supply if there is a nuclear accident, how much water will be used and exactly what is this vaunted state-of-the-art technology that city officials are talking about.

“I would like to see some of that modern technology,” Wink said. “They don’t have anything but what’s on the drawing boards. We had a space shuttle--the Challenger--that was state-of-the-art technology, and that blowed up.”

After a while, Jeri Osborne went out to her car and carried back a map of that part of the county. It was filled with dozens of stickpins, each representing someone who was dead or dying of cancer. By her reckoning, it represented about four times the normal cancer rate.

Her map has been attacked as unscientific. Osborne’s reply to that is simple enough: “These are all people I know.”

Pantex’s actual role in the reconfiguration of the weapons complex will not be known until 1993, when the DOE issues its report. But Jim Werner, an environmental engineer with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council said he believed the most likely possibility will be the storage of excess plutonium as more weapons are disassembled. The country already has a huge supply of plutonium at its disposal.

“So the question is, are we stockpiling or storing waste,” he said.

Mayor Adams said the community is overwhelmingly in favor of the Pantex expansion and that two days of public hearings on the matter will be held later this month. He also said the the possibility of the plant’s closing if it is not expanded should be taken very seriously.

“I don’t think it’s a bluff,” he said. “I think it’s a real possibility.”

O’Brien, meanwhile, said he conducted his own poll, which shows a number of people swaying in his direction. He said the huge amount of money and jobs being dangled before the public amounts to economic blackmail.

“The result is that the deal stinks,” he said.