CRACK FOUND AT PLANT NUCLEAR REACTOR REMAINS CLOSED
The New York TimesSUN-SENTINEL
WILMINGTON, Del. -- The company managing three closed military nuclear reactors in South Carolina notified the government early Saturday that a crack had developed in one reactor's cooling system.
The reactors are the only source of a perishable gas that is vital to the nation's nuclear warheads, and all three were shut down last spring.
The crack, which the company said it discovered on Friday night, was in a pipe that delivers coolant to the reactor that was to have been the first one restarted.
Discovery of this crack comes just a few days after the managing company, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., notified the Department of Energy, which owns the plant, of a crack in a coolant pipe at another reactor.
That crack, however, was detected in April, and the department is investigating the eight-month delay in reporting it.
P. William Kaspar, the manager of the Energy Department's field office at the enormous Savannah River Plant near Aiken, S.C., said he was awakened on Saturday and informed of the crack beneath the K reactor.
Kaspar said it would be replaced but it was too early to know whether doing so would further delay restarting the reactor.
In Washington, Richard W. Starostecki, the deputy assistant secretary for safety, health and quality assurance, said he was sending a team of experts to the weapons plant next week to assess the situation.
John C. Layton, the department's inspector general, is scheduled to arrive on Thursday at the plant to launch an investigation into the lengthy delay in forwarding to the Energy Department an internal Du Pont memorandum on the discovery of cracks in a coolant pipe from the L reactor.
The April 19 memorandum confirmed that cracks had developed beneath support braces that were welded to the 16-inch-diameter pipe.
The 6-foot-long, roughly 500-pound piece of pipe is part of the critical plumbing system that carries heavy water to the reactor to prevent its melting during operation.
The piece of pipe had been removed from the L reactor in October 1987 after cracks were found in welds linking it to another pipe.
Du Pont engineers said that similar pieces of cracked pipe were removed from the three operating reactors at the plant and replaced with new pipe roughly 20 times in the past three years.
The piece removed in October 1987 underwent sophisticated testing in which it was determined that more cracks had developed beneath the support braces. The discovery was important, Du Pont and Energy Department engineers now agree, because cracks had never been discovered beneath the braces.
The April memorandum was written weeks before Starostecki and members of his safety division began a close inspection of those braces and whether they would withstand severe earthquakes.
"We had discussions at that time between myself, Du Pont and DOE Savannah River about the possibility of cracks near those braces," Starostecki said on Saturday.
The crack in the K reactor pipe was discovered in an ongoing inspection of the more than 300 welds holding the K reactor's primary cooling system together.
Kaspar said he was told by Du Pont engineers that even though the crack was not considered serious enough, the pipe would be replaced.
Du Pont inspectors on Thursday also analyzed 19 spots on coolant pipes in the K reactor similar to the area below the braces where cracks were found on the pipe taken from the L reactor.
Du Pont engineers said no indications of cracks had been found on the pipes on the K reactor. The company said it would inspect for cracks beneath roughly 50 more braces.
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