Contractors used substandard materials
By James Rosen
jrosen@mcclatchydc.com
WASHINGTON — Contractors at the Savannah River Site — one of the country’s major nuclear-weapons complexes — repeatedly procured dangerous construction materials and components that failed to meet federal safety standards, according to a recently completed internal government probe.
One of the substandard materials revealed at the Savannah River Site on the South Carolina-Georgia border “could have resulted in a spill of up to 15,000 gallons of high-level radioactive waste,” the inspector general of the U.S. Energy Department found.
The five-month investigation also disclosed the purchase of 9,500 tons of substandard reinforcing steel at the SRS site near Aiken.
The faulty steel was discovered after a piece of it broke during construction of a facility that will convert spent weapons plutonium and uranium into mixed-oxide — or MOX — fuel for civilian reactors.
Replacement of 14 tons of the substandard “rebar” — the reinforcing steel — that had already been installed cost $680,000 and caused new delays in completing the $4.8 billion MOX facility, the investigation disclosed.
Among other questionable components identified in the probe were piping, steel plates, an unusable $12 million “glovebox” (used to handle contaminated materials), furnace module doors and robots used to eliminate human exposure to radiological and chemical materials.
In an April 23 memo to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Inspector General Gregory Friedman said contractors and subcontractors that build, supply and install equipment at SRS facilities ignored safety regulations developed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
“We identified multiple instances in which critical components did not meet required quality and safety standards,” Friedman wrote to Chu.
The Savannah River Site produced tritium, plutonium-239 and other materials used to make nuclear weapons from 1954 to 1991, when the United States stopped making atomic bombs with the end of the Cold War.