Bad Scene at Rocky Flats

By Dick Thompson

In a special meeting at the White House last week, President Reagan and Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci asked Department of Energy Secretary John Herrington to answer one question: Is the nation's nuclear stockpile in jeopardy? There was ample reason for their concern. A few days earlier, Building 771 at the Government's Rocky Flats plutonium-processing plant in Colorado became the second weapons facility to be shut down in less than two months, after three people were exposed to radioactive material. Simultaneously, a Government report charged DOE-run weapons-research labs with lax security during visits by foreign experts, including some from Soviet bloc countries.

Herrington assured Reagan that DOE was still capable of making nuclear bombs and announced that the agency plans as early as late December to restart at least one of its beleaguered Savannah River reactors in South Carolina, where production of tritium was halted for safety reasons in August. Still, many question whether DOE will be ready any time soon to make radioactive materials for weapons safely and without further damage to the environment. "The Department of Energy is solving problems as they arise," charged Democratic Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma. "What we need is a serious overhaul of DOE oversight." As if to underscore that concern, DOE officials reported at week's end that the DOE's nuclear weapons plant at Fernald, Ohio, had released thousands of tons of radioactive uranium waste over the past few decades into the atmosphere and the regional water supply. Plant workers and thousands of surrounding residents have been exposed to danger.

The energy agency, whose sprawling, $8.1 billion-a-year nuclear-weapons network includes ten plants and four labs around the country, countered by promising new safeguards and safety procedures. Among the promised corrective measures: establishing better management guidelines for private contractors, like Rockwell, Westinghouse and Du Pont, who now operate DOE facilities; hiring better-trained engineers; and instilling employees with the proper "mental attitude" toward safety.

Officials at the Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore research centers, for their part, flatly denied that any unauthorized visitors have had access to classified material and insisted that their security is reliable.

The DOE response was unlikely to mollify congressional critics like Ohio Democratic Senator John Glenn, who sponsored a proposal to appoint a civilian panel to oversee safety at DOE facilities. A watered-down version has become law, but it allows DOE leeway to monitor the network. "There is no evidence the DOE can police itself," says Michael Clark, president of the Environmental Policy Institute in Washington. The agency's weapons-production personnel, he adds, "are a rogue bureaucracy that is out of control."

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington