‘Think Safety’: Prime Need in a Nuclear Era : Administration decision might raise risk at atomic facilities

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) Wednesday called on Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to reconsider her decision to eliminate the U.S. Office of Nuclear Safety, transferring nuclear safety to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Safety and Health. Cohen says, rightly: “Nuclear safety has traditionally ranked low in the Energy Department’s priorities, and I am afraid that Secretary O’Leary’s action sends precisely the wrong signal to a department that does not ‘think safety’ often enough.” The same might be said of recent behavior at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Nuclear hazards fall into three categories: accident, sabotage and waste. Cohen drew attention to the first, citing the explosion Tuesday of a nuclear storage tank at the Tomsk-7 plutonium separation facility in Russia. Although that tank was made of stainless steel, buried in the earth and covered by a concrete slab, the explosion (a chemical explosion) blew off the slab and emptied the entire contents of the tank into the atmosphere. The radioactive plume--far smaller, fortunately, than the one from Chernobyl--is moving northeast, away from inhabited areas, but Cohen is right to see the explosion as a warning and to cite the Hanford, Wash., storage tank in this country as a similar disaster waiting to happen. A General Accounting Office report issued last month on the Hanford waste tanks concludes, albeit in antiseptic language, that no real progress has been made in bringing this extremely unstable, frighteningly dangerous site under control.

THE TERRORISM PROBLEM: But nuclear sabotage--nuclear terrorism, if you will--is now as serious a hazard as nuclear accident. Several years ago a study undertaken by Sandia National Laboratories at the request of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that domestic nuclear facilities were vulnerable to truck bomb attack. The NRC staff then initiated an effort to upgrade the “design basis” safety of nuclear power plants to include defense against truck bombs. In 1989, the NRC scuttled this effort and instead called on the plants merely to develop “contingency plans” that could be implemented if U.S. intelligence warned of an imminent truck bomb attack. The bombing of the World Trade Center strongly suggests that U.S. intelligence cannot guarantee advance warning to power plants any more than to other potential targets of terrorism. On Feb. 7 a mental patient managed to crash his car through two security fences and breach the door of the turbine building at the Three Mile Island power plant. Had he been a terrorist like the one who bombed the World Trade Center, America might now have a Chernobyl in Pennsylvania. The NRC should immediately implement maximum security measures against this kind of attack.

THE WASTE PROBLEM: Finally, there is nuclear waste, the immense, still-unsolved problem that is a part of the ordinary, accident-free, unsabotaged operation of nuclear facilities. On Monday, Secretary O’Leary unveiled a $19.6-billion budget that would eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons production jobs and shift funds toward cleanup of the horribly polluted weapons production sites that the DOE operated during the Cold War.

Regrettably, O’Leary reneged on yet another Clinton campaign promise by caving in to political pressure from Illinois senators and renewing funding for breeder reactor research at that state’s Argonne National Laboratory. As the chairmen of four relevant congressional committees have pointed out in a letter to O’Leary, the breeder reactor, contrary to its recent advertising, will not decrease the volume of waste to be disposed and, in fact, will change that waste to a more hazardous form.

With waste, as with accident and sabotage, Cohen is right: The Clinton Administration needs to be reminded to “think safety” first.