
          Plutonium Politics: The Poisoning of South Carolina
          By Carothers, AndreAndre Carothers
          Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 4-5, 8-11
          
          It's not hard to attract attention at the Savannah River Plant, particularly if you are roaring along its southwestern boundary in a 250-horsepower speedboat, as we were, with a man in the bow training a telephoto lens on the far bank. Particularly since the private army that guards this nondescript
stretch of South Carolina river is negotiating a new five-year, $300
million contract. And especially since, after thirty years of working
quietly behind a smokescreen of secrecy and deft public relations, the
lid has been blown off the business here, the business that has taken
up a Chicago-sized piece of South Carolina pine forest, poured
millions of gallons of toxic and radioactive waste into the
groundwater and veiled the southeastern United States in a radioactive
mist-the business of making plutonium and tritium for nuclear
bombs.
          So we weren't surprised by the uniformed guards that followed in a
cowled speedboat. Or the sheriff's deputies who politely interrupted
our lunch on the Georgia side of the river. But the helicopter, well,
that seemed like a bit much, at least at first. But that was before I
began to understand the psychological state of South Carolina and its
relationship with things nuclear, an uneasy alliance called
"schizophrenic" by one local activist and "downright
insane" by another.
          Today, South Carolina's once-invisible Savannah River Plant, like
its sister plant in Washington state and the entire U.S. government
nuclear weapons complex, is under siege. Three decades of undercover
production of plutonium and tritium have left South Carolina with more
high-level radioactive waste than any known place on earth. The
breakneck pace of warhead production set by the Reagan Administration
has forced the Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors to run
roughshod over local laws and sensibilities and push the aging
reactors well past the limits of safety and common sense. The DuPont
Company, having managed the site since day one, is getting ready to
pack up and leave because the place is such a mess they don't want to
be liable for anything that might go wrong. And South Carolina, the
state that in the seventies was called "the most pro-nuclear state
in the country" is now wondering if perhaps it hasn't been burned,
forever.
          
            Origins of the SRP
          
          If there had been a cultural historian on the staff after World War
II, the Truman administration might have had second thoughts about
choosing South Carolina as the site for a multibillion dollar
"bomb factory." This is the ultimate Southern
state, General Sherman's "hell-hole of secession," where in
certain circles the Civil War is still known as The War of Northern
Aggression. This is the state whose econ-

omy for its first hundred
years had more in common with a one-crop Caribbean slave island than
the industrial north. When the U.S. government announced in 1950 that
the town of Ellenton and a few neighboring communities, comprising
1,500 families, a few small businesses and 150 cemeteries, would be
uprooted to accommodate a military facility, South Carolina
characteristically presented both faces. The invasion was at once
condemned as a Truman plan to "import alien and northern
voters," welcomed as an economic boon, and accepted with both
pride and resignation as a patriotic duty.
          And so the Savannah River Plant (SRP) joined Washington's Hanford
Nuclear Reservation as one of two massive complexes supplying fuel for
the nation's nuclear arsenal. E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company was asked
by the government to run it. For more than thirty years, DuPont has
reigned here, Washington's local emissary, managing state politics and
opinion in a manner that mixed cloying summer camp paternalism with a
Big Brother dictatorship.
          The Savannah River Plant News, an employee
newspaper published by DuPont, set the tone with reports on the
softball scores of the teams carved from the facility's 15,000
employees, the spotless safety record, the women's knitting club and
the latest promotions. DuPont tree specialists planted 40,000
seedlings a day, turning the condemned farmland into the state's most
productive tree farm. The happy family aura was pursued relentlessly
and with great success.
          
            Slowly the Memory Faded
          
          Local businesses championed DuPont's cause because the company
pumped $350 million a year into the troubled rural
economy. Politicians likewise rallied to the cause, in typical
Southern fashion.
          Legend has it that one state senator's support for splitting the
atom on the banks of the Savannah was guaranteed, "as long as he
got his half." The editor of the plant's newspaper became editor
of the nearby Aiken Standard, the town of New
Ellenton was established, and slowly the memory of Ellenton's death
faded. The mammoth construction site, with its five reactor complexes,
230 miles of highway and 153 scattered dumps for toxic waste and
radioactive debris blended chameleon-like into the porous, forgiving
South Carolina soil.
          Soft-spoken, almost fragile, with an air of kindness and gentility
that is almost unnerving, Bill Lawless seems at first a most unlikely
whistleblower. But in fact, just five years ago, he was one of the
first to come out. That's what they call it when someone breaks the
code of silence and goes public with evidence of wrongdoing at the
"Bomb Plant." They come out--like a debutante, or
a refugee.
          Within a year of quitting his DOE post as project manager of the
plant's Burial Ground, where radioactive waste and toxic chemicals are
buried or poured into pits, Lawless decided to testify at the trial of
a handful of protesters who had been arrested for trespassing at the
plant gates. Lawless's testimony was the first revelation of the
deceptive and unsafe practices that had remained secret since the
1950s. It would not be the last.
          His most famous confession ("It always gets their
attention," he told me) is about the cardboard boxes. Radioactive
wastes that are not so concentrated or dangerous that they must be
stored in double-walled tanks were buried in cardboard boxes. Not
special, reinforced, double-lined cardboard boxes, just plain old
cardboard boxes.
          Then he talked about the double set of books. DuPont and DOE, he
said, have two sets of information from which they analyze the rate at
which toxic and radioactive wastes travel through the sandy soil into
the groundwater. One set of statistics is drawn from the
"public" sampling wells, figures often
manipulated by flushing the wells with water or pumping them out and
then drawing a sample. The other is for internal use only. The
internal figures are either unpublished or buried reports often
labeled "draft" and thus protected from public requests under
the Freedom of Information Act. And, most chilling of all, he talked
about the waste contaminated with tritium and strontium-90 that was
slowly leaking into groundwater.
          This was the first deviation from the model-the way things ought to
be, according to DuPont and DOE-versus the way things actually
were. DuPont had models for how radioactive elements would move in
groundwater, how radiation would disperse over surrounding
communities, how safety records should look and how Dupont employees
should act. Things that didn't fit the model were not wrong, they just
didn't exist.
          
            Growing Opposition to
Polluters
          
          Thus, for DOE and DuPont, Lawless's testimony was more than just
treason, it was insanity. "People suffer from a form of cognitive
dissonance at SRP," says Lawless, "They see things are wrong,
but they are not supposed to be wrong, so they don't see
them. Radionuclide migration was something we weren't supposed to
see. Public records showed tritium levels two or three times the
drinking water standard, but our own records showed levels a thousand
times that. They said strontium-90 didn't move, and they said
plutonium didn't move, but we found it happening. It just wasn't
supposed to happen."
          "The people that work at SRP are normal human beings, and they
are great human beings, but there is a form of thought control
here. If they tell you that things are sup-

posed to look good, and they
tell everyone else that things do look good, then you can't expect
people to go against management and say it is not so. It took someone
very naive, like me, to write it up."
          At the same time Bill Lawless was undergoing a crisis of conscience
about waste-handling inside the plant, citizens outside-from Columbia,
Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and Charleston-were beginning to wonder
about the wisdom of the region's increasingly irrevocable relationship
with the atom.
          In the early seventies, Ruth Thomas founded Environmentalists,
Incorporated, hoping to organize legal challenges to the state's
polluters. A few years later, Michael Lowe helped found the Palmetto
Alliance, modeling it on New England's grass roots,
civil-disobedience-oriented Clamshell Alliance. These groups, in the
words of Bob Alvarez, of the Washington-based Environmental Policy
Institute, were the "midwives" of organized
opposition to SRP.
          Oblivious to the growing opposition, the Defense Department and its
partners in the commercial nuclear industry persisted with the rapid
nuclearization of the state. In the late seventies, Allied Gulf
Nuclear Services neared completion of a commercial reprocessing plant,
Barnwell Nuclear Fuel Plant, to recover plutonium and uranium from
spent nuclear fuel. At the same time, Chem-Nuclear Services opened a
low-level waste dump. Both were located in Barnwell County on the edge
of the Savannah River Plant.
          The final indignity came with the election of Ronald
Reagan. Already, the aging nuclear weapons production plants were
being pressed by outgoing President Jimmy Carter to increase
production of tritium and plutonium, and Reagan pushed the schedule up
still further. Reagan's first "Stockpile Memorandum," the Defense
Department's schedule for warhead construction (also known as "the
shopping list"), set priorities for fifteen years instead of the usual
eight, and proposed building 21,000 warheads inside of a decade.
          
            The 'Department of Bombs'
          
          Meeting this demand would require restarting an old mothballed
reactor at Hanford and one at Savannah River. It would shift DOE's
emphasis further into bomb-making, turning it, in the words of one
weapons lab physicist, into "The Department of Bombs."
"Carter restarted the engine of the nuclear weapons complex,"
says Alvarez, "and Reagan put the pedal to the metal."
          With the rekindling of DOE's nuclear fires, South Carolina found
itself facing a brand new nuclear future, just as a handful of
investigators were digging into what was 

appearing to be a very
frightening past. Inspired by the discovery in the University of South
Carolina library of a document showing that DuPont had been keeping
tabs on the waste stream and the radiation exposures of workers,
Alvarez filed a Freedom of Information Act request and soon found
himself the owner of three shelves of bound SRP data. "It was a
great collection of information. We could analyze their operations
based on their actual numbers-the releases, everything-not the reports
that they had prepared from the numbers."
          Once again, reality began to conflict with DuPont models. Based on
the reams of raw data supplied by DOE, Alvarez and his colleagues at
the Environmental Policy Institute pumped out analyses showing, among
other things, that people in the area were getting radiation doses
fifty times what they should have been getting according to DuPont
models. They discovered that the high-level wastes in the fifty-one
underground tanks contained more plutonium (about fifty bombs' worth)
than safety and common sense would suggest. They showed that a cloud
of radioactivity that DOE alleges had drifted over from a Nevada test
in March of 1955 was more likely the result of a serious release from
the reactor area.
          They discovered a leukemia rate among workers twice what it should
have been. They pointed out that if the U.S. Geological Survey was
correct, and there was a decent, if slim, chance that the Charleston
Earthquake of 1886 could repeat itself in Barnwell County, then a
rupture of the high-level waste tanks was likely. In that event, more
than a billion curies of long-lived radio-isotopes would be released
in the southeastern United States, making the fifty million-curie
Chernobyl accident look like spilled milk.
          
            Whistleblowers' Revelations
          
          Alvarez's revelations joined the criticisms of other courageous
whistle-blowers. After years of trying to encourage reform on the
inside, Arthur Dexter, a DuPont physicist, went public in 1985 with a
report on a leak from a building called the canyon, where the
reprocessing of spent fuel takes place. He became the leading critic
of the reactors' so-called "containment system."
Unlike commercial reactors, the military reactors have no concrete
dome to keep in radioactive contamination in case of an
accident. Instead, they rely on filters and carbon sponges, a system
that Dexter considers far from adequate. "An explosion would
destroy the air filters, and some water could render those charcoal
beds worthless," says Dexter, "And then you'd have radioactive
iodine and other poisons pouring out of the building."
          Engineer Fred Christensen came forward to recount the story about
the time the reactor almost blew up about the frantic control room
engineer who barked out, "close the rotor valves" to stem a
cooling water leak on the reactor floor. Had he not been countermanded
by a senior manager, says Christensen, "the reactor would have gone
off in a big whoof." Christensen's personal reactor safety plan,
he confessed, involved using a pair of wire cutters he kept in his
desk drawer to cut a beeline through SRP's fences-upwind from the
meltdown.
          But it was Washington's imperious push to open the L-reactor that
finally broke the nuclear spell over South Carolina. "They
basically said they were going to start up the reactor," says
Michael Lowe, "but they didn't have to do an environmental impact
statement. The idea that they could reopen a thirty-year-old nuclear
reactor, dump contaminants into the ground, heat up Steel Creek with
cooling water to 150 degrees and add to the already enormous pile of
sizzling radioactive wastes and say that there is no significant
environmental impact-it's unbelievable."
          "What they were really saying is, 'Look, don't bother us with
your rules and regulations. We've got bombs to build.' And anyone
who tried to stop them was 'working against the national
interest.' well, people down here just don't like to be pushed
around that way."
          Frances Close Hart, a member of one of the state's most prominent
families, was one of those people. A Palmetto Alliance volunteer for a
short time, she had just started her own group, the Energy Research
Foundation, to pursue legal challenges to the bomb plant. Joining with
the Natural Resources Defense Council, ERF sued the Department of
Energy for refusing to do an environmental impact statement. Soon they
were joined by several regional environmental groups such as Georgia's
Coastal Citizens For a Clean Environment and, halfway through the
proceedings, by the state of South Carolina.
          Two years later, they had won the lawsuit and significantly delayed
the L-reactor start-up. But they had also changed the tenor of South
Carolina's plutonium politics. The damage to DOE and DuPont was far
greater than the the two years in lost time and money. The state
government had joined Frances Close Hart and a national environmental
group in suing DuPont and the Department of Energy. Opposition to
DuPont and the SRP had become acceptable, even respectable. "Here
was one Southern state and a handful of Southern activists having a
tangible effect on the arms race," marveled Bob Alvarez. South
Carolina, "the most pro-nuclear state in the country," had
grown up. Or, as one South Carolina activist with a sense of history
put it, "We returned to our roots."
          After Chernobyl, it was no longer just a dozen other activists
against the Savannah River Plant. Suddenly, everyone was peering into
the Department of Energy's military reactors to see whether the
disaster upstream of Kiev could happen upstream of Savannah, or on the
banks of the Columbia in Washington.
          
            A Crescendo of Self-Examination
          
          The flurry of self-examination reached a crescendo in 1987. The
year opened with the revelation that the SRP reactors had been running
at a power level beyond the capabilities of the cooling system, and
the levels were reduced by a quarter. In January, a panel of experts
convened by the Department of Energy recommended that Hanford's
N-reactor be closed for repairs; in an unusual dissenting opinion, two
of the panel's members, including the chairman, called for it to be
closed down forever. A year later, it would be.
          In March 1987, it was decided that the SRP reactors were still
cranked up too high, and power was cut by half. Six months later, a
memo from a House Subcommittee revealed that DuPont personnel had shut
down sprinkler systems in the tritium facility because they were more
worried about 

computers getting wet than the building burning
down. And in October, the long-awaited National Academy of Sciences
report on the Savannah River Plant came out. The National Academy of
Sciences is the government's reality check. It has been called in to
look at the nuclear industry several times over the years, but never
before has it turned in such a scathing report.
          The 67-page critique called the oversight of DOE "ingrown and
largely outside the scrutiny of the public." All the reactors at
Savannah River Plant are subject to corrosion, cracks and "other
symptoms of acute aging." Confirming Arthur Dexter's criticisms,
the report condemned the filter "containment
system" as unlikely to withstand the hydrogen explosion
associated with an accident. Some sort of rigorous oversight is
required, concluded the National Academy of Sciences, to bring the
Department of Energy and its contractors under control. 
          The Academy's report was released the morning of
Oct. 29,1987. Three hours later, DuPont announced that when its
contract ran out at the end of 1989, it would leave.
          On the first of March, a Tuesday morning, I drove through the
Savannah River Plant on the state highway. At the entrance a guard
checked the time, counted the number of people in the car and wrote
the information on a card. I handed this card to another guard who
looked me over when I came out, twenty miles down the road at the
other side of the plant.
          
            'Security Means Jobs'
          
          The scenery is pretty, mostly pine trees and the occasional soupy
South Carolina marsh, broken by dozens of billboards that exhort the
SRP employees: "Security Means Jobs," "Security is Your
Business," and one curious admonition to "Play Safely."
Around lunchtime, over the radio, a broadcaster announced that a
release of radioactive tritium had occurred at the plant at 6:18 that
morning. It amounted to approximately 20,000 curies, the result of an
equipment malfunction. At no time was there any danger to the public,
the reporter quoted a DuPont manager as saying; the exposure at the
plant boundary would be far less than an average chest X-ray.
          It was difficult to feel reassured. I remembered Bill Lawless
talking about how they pulled numbers out of the air. I wondered if
the "exposure at the plant boundary" was calculated from one of
the many computer-generated models DuPont had devised, based on the
way they would like things to be. Obviously, tritium gas didn't fan
out in perfect concentric circles from the point of release. Didn't
the direction of the prevailing winds make a difference? The
reassurance came so quickly from DuPont it had the mark of an oft-used
and unthinking reflex, like arms raised to ward off a blow. [See news
briefs; page 7.]
          Arthur Dexter says these plants are too dangerous for humans to
run. "You have to be perfect to do what they do there," he
said, "and nobody's perfect. Eventually something will go
wrong." DuPont wanted to be perfect, so much so that it put an
elaborate false front on the messy business of making bombs in South
Carolina and painted a picture of a gleaming technological wonderland
where nothing went wrong, where the only news allowed was good
news. Such illusions, they found, become brittle with age.
          Compared to the half-life of some of the nuclear particles in its
soil, South Carolina's infatuation with the atom was vanishingly
brief. Like a giant sponge, the sandy soil will hold the millions of
gallons of contaminated water from SRP indefinitely. To clean up the
mess here, and the mess at Hanford, could cost $100 billion, or about
a dollar for every three dollars spent on the nuclear arms race since
1943. The thirty-five million gallons of high-level waste are to be
turned into glass and stored permanently, a dangerous and decades-long
process. And many people are convinced that what we have learned about
SRP's dangerous legacy in the last eight years is only a small part of
the story.
          But the Defense Department is poised to begin again, evoking
national security to support its demands for a new set of
multi-billion plutonium and tritium production complexes. South
Carolina is at the top of the list, but I doubt it will be so
accommodating this time. Many people here are wondering whether the
definition of national security shouldn't include the preservation of
the state's environment and the health and safety of its
citizens. "South Carolina responded to the call from Washington,
and for a while, we forgot to take care of ourselves," says
Michael Lowe. "Now, I don't know if we'll ever think about our
country's security in the same way again. It's taken on anew meaning
down here. It's a lot closer to home now."
          David Albright, a physicist with the Federation of American
Scientists, has devoted years of poring over documents, radiation
release reports and budget requests to answer two questions: how much
plutonium and tritium do the United States and Soviet Union have, and
how much do they need?
          The questions are important ones, because although the
U.S. plutonium and tritium production reactors are dangerously
dilapidated, the Pentagon insists on running them. At 

the same time
the military is also demanding up to $10 billion to construct a new
production reactor.
          The most annoying aspect of the problem is that the U.S. government
refuses to outline its needs. In fact, it has lied. "In the past,
the DOE has dramatically overprojected its needs for plutonium
production for new warheads," says Albright, "and the amount we
have is barely a secret. Certainly the Soviets are familiar with
it."
          When DOE Secretary John Herrington admitted last February that the
U.S. is "awash with plutonium," contradicting years of pleas
for more production, he did not reinforce DOE's reputation for
honesty. "If we can't believe the Department of Energy's statements
about plutonium," says Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jim Beard,
"how can we believe it when they say we need a new production
reactor?"
          
            More Plutonium Production Not Needed
          
          Albright and his colleagues have come up with a number of for the
U.S. stockpile of plutonium-about 10,000 kilograms-and he thinks the
Soviet Union has about the same. Since plutonium can be recycled from
old weapons and essentially last forever, most analysts agree that
more production is not needed.
          Last November, a coalition* of experts and groups, including former
CIA head William Colby, SALT I negotiator Gerard Smith, former Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency head Paul Warnke, and MIT President
Emeritus Jerome Wiesner, circulated the "Plutonium Challenge,"
calling for a two-year ban on plutonium production. According to Frank
von Hippel of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs, Yevgeny Velikhov, head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and
top Gorbachev adviser, favors the idea.
          Tritium represents another problem. Used since the mid- fifties to
boost the explosive power of nuclear warheads, tritium decays-its
half-life is about twelve years. Tritium's short lifespan means that,
without a steady resupply of the material, most nuclear warheads in
the U.S. arsenal will eventually stop working. Tritium's lifespan also
creates a problem for the arms control community. Many environmental
and arms control groups, while loath to support the construction of a
new production reactor, find it hard to oppose a steady tritium supply
in the face of arguments for "maintaining deterrence." As
Albright says, "tritium erodes political alliances."
          But for some the question is not hard to answer. "I say we shut
the facilities down. They are just too dangerous," says physicist
Arthur Dexter, who for three decades worked for the Department of
Energy at the Argonne Laboratory and then at the Savannah River
Plant. Damon Moglen, director of Greenpeace's nuclear campaigns,
agrees: "Ensuring environmental health and safety requires that
plutonium and tritium production stop. If this means the Soviet Union
and the United States have to start thinking seriously about
disarmament, then so be it." 
          The Federation of American
Scientists, Greenpeace, the Environmental Policy Institute, the Energy
Research Foundation, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources
Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union
of Concerned Scientists.
          
            Andre Carothers is editor of Greenpeace Magazine.
          
        