Energy Dept. Budget Would Eliminate Thousands of Jobs : Priorities: While nuclear arms output would be slashed, focus shifts to the environment, efficient power sources.

Pronouncing itself on the cutting edge of changes called for by the White House, the Department of Energy unveiled a $19.6-billion budget Monday that would eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons production jobs and shift priorities toward environmental cleanup and the development of more efficient energy sources.

Although Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary said new programs would provide jobs for many of those idled by the curtailment of weapons production, she acknowledged that it “would be unfair to pretend that each job will be replaced, slot for slot.”

Altogether, about 8,600 of more than 48,000 weapons workers are expected to be idled. And department officials said that about $200 million is included in the budget to ease the effect on the department’s 140,000 contract employees. The money will be spent for worker retraining, relocation and retirement incentives, as well as for assistance to local communities affected by the cutbacks.

Hardest hit by the budget request--to be sent to Congress soon for its approval--is likely to be the Savannah River, S.C., nuclear complex, where the Clinton Administration has decided not to restart an idled reactor that produced tritium for nuclear warheads.

As many as 2,900 workers could lose their jobs at the sprawling complex, where tritium and plutonium were produced throughout the Cold War years.

Also scheduled for sharp cutbacks are the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver, which produced triggers for atomic warheads, and the complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where uranium components were fashioned.

Altogether, weapons work would be reduced from $7.2 billion to $5.9 billion under the proposed budget. But defense-related programs would still absorb a hefty part of the department’s budget because of the astronomical cost of cleaning up polluted weapons sites, the disassembly of warheads under arms agreements with Russia and preparations for weapons tests, now suspended by Congress.

The eventual cost of cleaning up weapons sites, including Rocky Flats, Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Hanford, Wash., and several others, has been estimated as high as $300 billion--perhaps $50 billion for Hanford alone.

O’Leary said Monday that cleanup schedules negotiated by the George Bush Administration’s Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency with affected states are being examined closely. Already the timetable to begin construction on a Hanford plant to solidify millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste has been set aside.

While trimming back the weapons program and nuclear energy research, the Administration is asking Congress to increase by more than $1 billion this year’s outlays for energy conservation and renewable energy sources. An increase of $52 million, for a total outlay of $157 million, is being targeted for research and development aimed at encouraging the use of natural gas.

Congress also is being asked to increase spending to convert high-technology weapons laboratories to peaceful work. But their future roles still unclear, Los Alamos, Lawrence-Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories will all be subjected to budget and employment cuts.

Following through on President Clinton’s promise to slash spending on nuclear power research, the department cut its civilian reactor development programs by $30 billion.

But after Illinois senators lobbied on behalf of the Argonne National Laboratory, the department restored $22 million for a demonstration breeder reactor that would use plutonium created as waste by commercial nuclear power plants.

The technology is offered by Argonne as a potential future alternative to the permanent disposal of spent reactor fuel in the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada.

But the idea has little support in the nuclear utility industry and it has aroused the ire of environmentalists who see it as a step toward plutonium reprocessing in the United States.

To stop the spread worldwide of plutonium and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the Jimmy Carter Administration halted the reprocessing of plutonium from the spent fuel of commercial reactors.