European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - January 16, 1989, Darmstadt, Hesse Nuclear malaise in America by Fox Butterfield new York times forty four years ago when the first nuclear reactor at the Hanford reservation a Richland Wash., was started up to make plutonium for the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki Enrico Fermi stood by with his slide Rule to Correct initial miscalculations. Today the Nobel laureates Are Long gone from Hanford. The main work at the reservation is cleaning up the wastes left by Hanford s nine idled reactors and five plutonium processing plants and the Energy department official who directs the project describes himself As a career government official not a scientist or Engineer. His Domain once a technological Marvel with a work Force of More than 50,000 people sits largely abandoned the Gray reactors and hulking plutonium plants littered across the Sagebrush desert like Industrial dinosaurs. Hanford s decline reflects the troubles of the nation s manufacturing of nuclear weapons which in Many ways parallel the weakening of other once proud industries like automobiles and steel. Developed with extraordinary Speed in world War ii by Many of the world s greatest scientists the nuclear bomb factories Are now largely unable to make new weapons. Many veterans of the bomb Industry Trace the problems of aging equipment shoddy management and pollution and safety concerns to a withering of scientific and technical expertise in the government Agency that runs the system. We have a big problem with competitiveness and i think three quarters of that is that the Guys making decisions Don t understand the technical things any More said or. Harold Agnew a physicist who worked with Fermi on the world s first Chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 and eventually took Over the leadership of the los Alamos National Laboratory where atomic bombs were designed. One measure of the decline of technical competence is the difference Between the leaders of the program in the 1940s and in More recent years said Victor Weisskopf a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of technology another of the physicists who helped develop the first atomic bomb at los Alamos. In 1942, when j. Robert Oppenheimer was chosen to head the los Alamos project a number of the other scientists initially opposed his selection because unlike them he had not won a Nobel prize. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the managers of the bomb Complex included scientists like or. Glen t. Seaborg who won a Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering plutonium and served As chairman of the atomic Energy commission from 1961 to 1971. By contrast president Reagan s first Energy Secretary was or. James b. Edwards a dental surgeon and former governor of South Carolina. The current Energy Secretary John s. Herrington is a former corporate lawyer and White House assistant to Reagan. The under Secretary Joseph f. Salgado and the assistant Secretary for environment safety and health Ernest c. Baynard Iii Are also lawyers. To run the bomb factories which now resemble other Large chemical or metallurgical plants does not require a Nobel prize veterans of the Industry agree. But Agnew said you can t do it with a Bunch of lawyers and of the Energy department s eight regional office managers Only two have graduate degrees in science or engineering. Several including Joann Elferink the manager of the san Francisco regional office which supervises the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have no academic training in science. Lawrence Livermore does research on new warheads and the plan to build an anti missile system in space. Elferink a graduate in political science from the University of Kansas who is a former assistant City not the outdated control room of reactor a Hanford reservation in Richland Wash. Nuclear bomb factories developed in Wii Are now mostly unable to produce new weapons. Manager of Rochester n.y., was promoted to her current Job after serving As executive assistant to the under Secretary of Energy. In an interview in december Edwards the former Energy Secretary acknowledged i m no but his Job As it was envisioned in the Early 1980s, was not technical or scientific but bureaucratic he said Reagan had ordered him to abolish the Energy department and shift the nuclear arms Complex to the department of Commerce. It made sense but Congress was against it said Edwards who is now president of the medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Much to my disappointment i was t Able to work my Way out of a beyond the disappearance of scientists and engineers from the top ranks of management there Are other reasons for the troubles of the weapon Industry and in Many ways these also Mirror the problems of other once dominant . Industries say scientists economists and government officials. Just As those industries slighted investment in the Long term health of their companies in favor of Cost cutting and Short term profits the weapon managers exalted production Over maintenance and modernization. President Lyndon b. Johnson ordered budget cuts that ruled out modernization in the 1960s. When Reagan took office in 1981, he ordered Edwards both to Cut the Energy department s budget and to undertake the largest buildup of nuclear warheads since the Early 1950s. One result of this squeeze was that Edwards did not heed warnings from senior scientists and government engineers on the need to replace the nation s Only reactors for producing tritium which had been built in the Early 1950s and had a projected life of 25 to 30 years. Tritium is a perishable form of Hydrogen used to boost the explosive Power of nuclear warheads. We knew our reactors were aging Edwards said. But you have to set priorities. The Economy was in a shambles. We were trying to reduce the deficit and monday january 16, 1989 fight inflation. So we were shovelling Money out of the the three tritium producing reactors at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina were shut Down earlier this year for safety reasons and cracks have since been discovered in Cooling system pipes at two of the reactors. The Date when the reactors can be reopened has now become the subject of a bitter dispute within the Energy department with officials worrying that the . May have to begin deactivating some weapons to recover tritium for More important ones. Even when the government did set out to modernize its weapons plants technical and scientific shortcomings produced some spectacular failures. For example at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver which shapes plutonium into triggers for nuclear warheads engineers had Long recognized that the main building for processing plutonium building 771, was antiquated and becoming contaminated by radiation. So a new Structure building 371, using High technology Remote control equipment was completed in 1981 at a Cost of $225 million. But after operating for a month in 1982, building 371 had to be closed. Designers had neglected to plan for the exposure of the equipment to radiation and acids rendering it impossible to maintain several engineers familiar with the episode reported. The Energy department now estimates it would Cost nearly $400 million to make building 371 work. In the meantime the Plant must depend on building 771, which has been shut since last october after three employees were accidentally exposed to radiation. The disappearance of scientists from the ranks of government managers had its effect on the physicists and engineers who worked for the private companies that managed the plants for the government. Often said Arthur Dexter who worked for 30 years As a physicist for . Dupont de Nemours & co. At the Savannah River Plant we became Dupont Felt they knew it All and if some official from the department of Energy came to visit you made excuses not to see them he said. The stars and stripes Page 13
