By Brian Costner
A leak of radioactive water from an aged nuclear weapons plant has delayed the reactor's restart and piqued local concerns about the plant's safety.
The leak was discovered on December 24, 11 days after the Department of Energy announced that it was ready to restart the 38-year old K-Reactor at the Savannah River site, the country's only remaining nuclear weapons material production reactor. The department has spent 3
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On January 8 — two weeks after the leak was stopped — hundreds of citizens demanded answers from officials of the Energy Department and Westinghouse, the plant's prime contractor, at meetings on Hilton Head Island and in Beaufort, South Carolina.
In a rare showing of public outrage against the state's largest single employer, citizens pressed the plant officials to guarantee that such leaks would not happen again and to abandon plans to restart the reactor. Officials from the site said that they could not provide any such guarantees.
The Energy Department began refurbishing the plant in 1988, when it was shut down for routine maintenance and repairs. After a Senate hearing, local activism and national media focussed attention on its history of accidents. The work ended up taking three years, during which the department and Westinghouse insisted that adequate measures had been taken to protect the Savannah River.
But hours after energy secretary James Watkins authorised restart on December 13, operators encountered problems with the reactor's safety rods, used to stop the chain reaction in the event of an accident. Work to repair the safety rods delayed restart for several days.
Then, beginning on December 22 or 23, a leak in the reactor's cooling system spilled water containing an estimated 6000 curies of tritium into a stream which flows through the 325 square mile site. Tritium is the radioactive isotope of hydrogen used to boost the explosive power of nuclear weapons. A typical commercial nuclear power reactor in the United States releases about 800 curies of it a year.
The leak was not discovered until December 24 because, as Watkins has since explained, management was "insensitive" to the possibility of cooling water leaks. Though samples were collected every 12 hours on the days before and during the spill, water samples taken near the reactor on the 23rd and 24th were not immediately analysed — because the employee responsible for authorising transfer of the samples to the testing laboratory had the flu. On December 25 plant officials notified state environmental authorities in South Carolina and Georgia of unusually high tritium levels in streams by the plant. Westinghouse stopped the leak and issued a brief news release stressing that the spill posed no public health risk.
The contaminated water reached the Savannah River on December 26, and by the next day tritium levels were two to three time accepted standards several miles downstream.
The Beaufort-Jasper Water Authority, which uses the river to supply drinking water to 50,000 South Carolinians, shut its intakes on December 28 and began using reserve water supplies. Two food processing industries in Georgia halted operations. A Georgia paper mill brought in bottled water for its employees. On January 1 Georgia officials closed two oyster beds.
The crisis abated during the following week 6 as the radioactive water dispersed into the Atlantic Ocean.
[Abridged from the US Guardian.]