How Safe the Atom?

Are nuclear power plants safe? For years tha Atomic Energy Commission has insisted that they are. For one thing, the AEC argues, the plants are equipped with so many redundant safety devices that any conceivable accident simply could not occur. For another, they are designed to the most rigorous specifications of any peacetime industry. But evidence has recently accumulated aht the AEC's position is not as secure as it sounds. The commission held extensive hearings at Bethesda, Md., to allow nuclear critics, who represented a coalition of 60 citizen groups, to dispute the effectiveness of a safety device called teh "emergency core cooling system." This back-up complex of pipes and valves is designed to bathe the hot reactor core with cooling water if the main cooling system fails. Since the system has not ever actually been tested, not even in scale models, scientists have had to depend on mathematical models to decide whether it would really work. In the hearings, much to the AEC's chagrin, many of its own top nuclear-safety experts testified that "technically indefensible" assumptions were being made about the device. One AEC scientist even went so far as to label AEC rules governing operation of the cooling system "a triumph of hope over reason."

Bad Rods. There is also disturbing evidence that the nuclear fuel rods in one kind of big atomic plant have bent, crushed or cracked during normal operations. (So have those in a comparable plant in Switzerland.) What makes this problem especially troublesome is the fact that the fuel rods are among the most thoroughly tested part of any nuclear plant. The damage therefore probably cannot be traced to the simplest explanation: shoddy workmanship. Instead, it may have a more serious, generic cause: the rods, designed for and proved in a previous generation of smaller reactors, may simply not stand the higher pressures and temperatures of today's big reactors. Even so, the rods do not pose an imminent hazard to public safety--except in the unlikely even of a failure of the cooling system. Says a respected engineer: "We haven't the foggiest idea how this fuel would behave in such an accident."

In any case, the AEC has concluded that it would rather be safe that sorry. It just ordered that seven plants* must operate at restricted power levels until a crash study on the fuel problem is completed later this fall.

* Among them: the Robert E. Ginna reactor near Rochester, N.Y., Palisades near Kalamazoo, Mich., Maine Yankee at Wiscasset, Me., Indian Point No. 2 at Buchanan, N.Y., Beach Point No. 2 at Two Creeks, Wis., Turkey Point No. 3 on Florida's Biscayne Bay and Surry No. 2 in Gravel Neck, Va.

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