O’Leary Plans to Shake Up Energy Department System

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced a reorganization of her department Friday that reflects the Clinton Administration’s distaste for nuclear power and imposes a virtual shutdown of nuclear weapons production.

She reduced from 36 to 26 the number of what she called operating “pods” in a shake-up she said would “mirror the priorities of a changed world.”

She said the organizational chart she inherited, with its “layers and layers of people,” looked the same as it did when she left the department at the end of the Jimmy Carter Administration in January, 1981, even though its mission has changed radically.

The reorganization of the department will not result in any layoffs, she said, but will eliminate duplication and shift resources from weapons production to environmental cleanup.

O’Leary abolished the post of assistant secretary for nuclear energy, downgrading it to an “office” reporting to her deputy. She said the department’s budget, to be released next week, would reflect “much less emphasis on the nuclear industry.”

Budget figures obtained by the trade newsletter Energy Daily--and not challenged by O’Leary--said the department will seek $57.8 million in fiscal 1994 to refine existing reactor technology but will not seek funds to develop reactors that would use new technologies.

O’Leary said it was clear during the campaign that President Clinton was content to keep existing nuclear plants operating but wanted future electric generation to come from natural gas and renewable fuel sources, a preference she said the public shares.

O’Leary came from a nuclear utility, Northern States Power Co. of Minnesota, and was feared by some anti-nuclear activists as a stalking horse for the industry. But she said at a news conference Friday: “I belong to the President of the United States and to no industry.”

The reorganization eliminates two offices that only a few years ago were regarded as vital.

One is the Office of New Production Reactors, which until halfway through the George Bush Administration was running an $8.2-billion crash program to design and build two new reactors for production of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used in warheads.

Enough tritium for the nation’s dwindling weapons stockpile can be recycled from dismantled warheads until about the year 2010, according to government officials.

Also eliminated was the Office of Nuclear Safety, established by O’Leary’s predecessor, James D. Watkins, to ensure that safety regulations were enforced in the bomb-factory complex.