Word: plants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rolling countryside of southwestern Ohio, the leaves have begun to turn to brilliant reds, ochers and yellows. But in the Cincinnati suburb of South Greenhills, some ten miles east of the Department of Energy's Fernald nuclear weapons plant, Charles Zinser, 38, was preoccupied, unmindful of the glorious surroundings. Zinser recalled how beginning in 1984 he had rented a vegetable garden near the plant. He often took his two young sons along as he worked. Two years later, both were found to have cancer. Samuel, then eight, had leukemia, and Louis, two, had part of a leg amputated...
Operating well out of the public eye and, at least for a time, beyond Washington's view as well, technicians running an aging reactor at the Savannah River plant near Aiken, S.C., made errors in 1970 leading to the partial melting of a fuel rod. If the process had not been checked, it could eventually have led to a disaster on the order of the 1979 debacle at Three Mile Island. That frightening episode jolted the entire nation and inspired sharp reforms in the U.S. civilian nuclear power industry...
...poisonous wastes from the weapons plants pile up alarmingly and no proven solution to their safe disposal is found, yet another dilemma looms. Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus, a former Secretary of the Interior, last week ordered state police to stop any shipments of nuclear military wastes from entering the state. Since 1952 some 75% of the defense industry's low-level radioactive brew has been deposited in 120,000 drums and 11,000 boxes on a "temporary" basis at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, waiting for a new federal Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.Mex., to open. There...
...four biggest weapons plants in the U.S. have now been shut down. They are the pioneering Hanford facility in Washington, where eight reactors have been deactivated and the remaining one is on indefinite standby; the Savannah River complex, where all three operational reactors are down, knocking out the only means of producing tritium, a hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive power of nearly all the 22,000 U.S. nuclear warheads; the plutonium-processing plant at Rocky Flats near Boulder, Colo.; and the deceptively named Feed Materials Production Center, in Fernald, Ohio, where some workers are striking for higher wages...
Energy Secretary John Herrington readily admits that safety fell by the wayside in the past as "things got too cozy" with plant contractors. Despite the growing public outcry, however, he plans to restart one tritium-producing reactor at Savannah River in December and another early next year. Herrington, a lawyer and Reagan appointee, has taken commendable steps to infuse a safety- conscious attitude at the weapons facilities. But he has failed to heed complaints from environmentalists and Congressmen who believe the plant should remain closed until DOE files an environmental-impact statement on the 300- sq.-mi. facility...