Plutonium Blues in HanfordBlues in Hanford

Every time it happens it seems a bit like the beginning of doomsday. And it happened again at 6 p.m. last Sunday: an alarm shrilled, lights flashed in the control room. A monitor was signaling that the water cooling the plutonium- producing N reactor at Hanford, Wash., had dropped below acceptable levels. Shutdown!

Just a few hours after the Hanford reactor turned itself off last week, the authorities knew there had been a false alarm. "It was a faulty monitor," said Steven Irish, a spokesman for U.N.C. Nuclear Industries, which operates the reactor. "There wasn't a low-flow problem." And so, on Monday evening, technicians started "pulling rods" as the first step in starting the machine up again. Not for long, though. This week the N reactor, which produces nearly one-third of all U.S. plutonium, will be shut off again, for at least six months, for a long-overdue safety overhaul. Washington Governor Booth Gardner says he is "pleased" with the move, as are local environmentalists. But some citizens, already worried by the October closing of two smaller plutonium plants at Hanford, are concerned about the prospective loss of jobs (Hanford employs 14,300 people in all). "Business all over the place is slowing down," says Lisa Klempke, 35, a bartender at the Big Y Tavern in Richland, 20 miles from Hanford. "People are out of money. They're thinking of moving away. I can't blame them."

The first Hanford reactor was built in 1943, amid the remote sand and sagebrush near the juncture of the Snake and Columbia rivers, to provide plutonium for the bomb destined to destroy Nagasaki. The N reactor (its predecessors have all gone to their last great fission in the sky) dates back 23 years -- and was designed to last only 20. The parts are worn, the pumps and wiring often fail, the whole reactor conks out 20 to 25 times a year. The graphite casing that holds the nuclear rods is swelling by nearly an inch a year, and will collide with the overhead shielding by the middle of the next decade. Yet since Hanford is a federally owned weapons maker, it is not subject to the safety standards that the Government imposed on commercial nuclear plants.

The explosion at the Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl last April sent a shudder through the Hanford authorities. The Washington facility is the only U.S. Government-owned nuclear plant that uses graphite, as Chernobyl did, to control the atomic reaction. Also, Hanford is one of the few U.S. nuclear plants that, like Chernobyl, do not have a protective dome to prevent the release of accidental radiation. The Department of Energy appointed a commission to re-evaluate Hanford's safety, and the panel declared last month that an accident like the Chernobyl explosion was impossible. It added, however, that the reactor should be shut down temporarily for a $50 million series of alterations to "upgrade and enhance the safety of the reactor."

At the same time, an internal auditor for Rockwell International, one of eight contractors involved in running the plant, charged that there had been 54 critical safety lapses over the past two years at the two plants that provided fuel for the reactor. The worst of these occurred on Sept. 29, when workmen moving plutonium liquid from one container to another failed to shut off some adjoining pipes -- an oversight that could have led to a chain reaction. The Government closed both plants in early October.