New landlord assesses site (Savannah River)

Web posted Aug. 24 at 08:17 PM, By Brandon Haddock Staff Writer, Augusta (GA) Chronicle
http://augustachronicle.com/stories/082599/tec_124-5729.shtml

Savannah River Site's new landlord said Tuesday she would take a close look at the condition of the site's aging facilities.

``We cannot eat our seed corn,'' said Carolyn Huntoon, the U.S. Department of Energy's assistant secretary for environmental management. ``We have to have these capabilities.''

Dr. Huntoon was making her first trip to the federal nuclear-weapons site since becoming an assistant secretary July 13. She is the site's ``landlord,'' responsible for maintaining its infrastructure and managing most Energy Department operations there.

The site has a backlog of $60 million to $70 million in needed repairs and improvements, SRS officials have said. The list ranges from new equipment for labs to roof repairs at the site's two reprocessing plants, where rainwater now trickles into some areas exposed to radiation.

The problems do not pose safety hazards to site workers or the public, but will get worse, and grow more expensive, if not fixed, SRS officials have said.

On Tuesday, Dr. Huntoon said she soon would gather site managers from SRS and other Energy Department sites to address concerns about infrastructure.

``At some point, it's going to get out ahead of us,'' she said. ``It is critical. We've got to go back and look at these things.''

Dr. Huntoon also said she would closely monitor development of new SRS facilities. The site recently was criticized for the failure of a $550 million plant designed to help dispose of some radioactive waste. A replacement plant is expected to cost another $1 billion.

Dr. Huntoon, a career scientist who once served as director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, said management of such projects is one of her strengths.

The trick is to keep multi-million dollar projects lean and focused upon their original goals, she said.

``If you look at where programs have run into problems, historically it's been because you start down one path, and people keep adding things, and pretty soon you've gone from a telephone pole to a Christmas tree,'' she said. ``Nobody's sure how you got there, but you're still paying for it.''

Brandon Haddock covers energy issues for The Augusta Chronicle. He can be reached at (706) 823-3409 or bhaddock@augustachronicle.com.

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Truck Moves 2nd Load of Plutonium-Tainted Waste

Tuesday, August 24, 1999, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/1999/aug/08241999/utah/17670.htm

IDAHO FALLS -- The second of what promises to be hundreds of shipments of plutonium-contaminated waste from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory is on its way to a U.S. Department of Energy dump in New Mexico.

A truck containing 28 barrels of "non-mixed transuranic waste" -- clothing, tools, rags and other debris contaminated with radioactive elements -- left the eastern Idaho nuclear reservation early Monday afternoon for the nearly 900-mile trip to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

The shipment, which passes on Interstate highways in northern Utah, is expected to arrive at its destination early Wednesday morning.

INEL announced the shipment a week ago after correcting 21 deficiencies found in the way it documents the contents of the drums destined for the $2 billion dump. The federal audit findings prompted temporary loss of INEL's certification to ship material to New Mexico.

Those problems -- none considered to have compromised the safety of the first shipment in April -- raised questions about whether current waste shipments from Idaho contain radioactive-only material. The state of New Mexico is still assessing the ability of the underground facility to accept radioactive waste that is also tainted by other contaminants.

State officials believe there may be as many as 900 more barrels of radioactive-only waste to be shipped from the INEL, and the New Mexico permit for the other waste is expected before year's end.

Shipments to the New Mexico dump from all sites in the nation also have been slowed by a lack of TRUPACT containers that each hold 14 55-gallon drums of waste.

The Energy Department has been operating with only 15 of the shipping casks. But last month it sought bids on the manufacture of 70 more over the next five years. There would be 12 in the first order.

Under Idaho's unprecedented 1995 nuclear waste agreement with the federal government, the Energy Department must ship what amounts to 15,000 drums of plutonium-contaminated waste out of Idaho by the end of 2002.

All 315,000 barrels of that waste must be removed by 2019.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which opened March 26, had accepted 22 shipments as of last week: one from Idaho, 13 from the Rocky Flats nuclear plant near Denver and 13 from Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.

From INEL, the shipments travel south on I-15 to Weber Canyon in Utah, then east on I-84 to I-80 through Wyoming, then south through Colorado and into New Mexico.

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Activist says wider probe is warranted
Plutonium contamination at Piketon

Monday, August 23, 1999, By Bob Dreitzler Dispatch Staff Reporter
http://www.dispatch.com/pan/localarchive/plutonnws.html

PIKETON, Ohio -- An activist hopes emerging information about plutonium contamination at the Piketon uranium enrichment plant will lead to a broader investigation of problems that she said have plagued the plant and its workers for years.

"People are beginning to understand that I am not crazy because the things I have been talking about are starting to surface,'' Vina Colley said. "Some of the workers think I am trying to shut the plant down, but I am trying to get them help.''

Colley, 53, worked as an electrician at the gaseous diffusion plant about 70 miles south of Columbus in the early 1980s.

At the time, she said, she was exposed to a variety of dangerous materials, including oil laced with hazardous polychlorinated biphenyls and contaminated with uranium.

For more than a decade, she has been gathering information about nuclear materials and facilities and monitoring reports of leaks and spills at the local plant.

Colley is president of a local group, Portsmouth and Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security. She also belongs to the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and the Military Toxic Project, which studies depleted uranium issues and Gulf War illnesses.

She cites chronic bronchitis, chronic fatigue, hair loss, skin rashes, thyroid and connective tissue problems among her numerous health ailments. She's had a hysterectomy and surgeries to remove three tumors.

Colley draws Social Security disability payments and has unresolved medical claims involving the plant's former operators and the state workers' compensation agency.

She said concern for plant workers and the surrounding community, as much as her health problems, have motivated her to become a watchdog.

Colley questioned whether the U.S. Department of Energy's acknowledgment this month that plutonium may have been shipped to Piketon from a sister plant in Paducah, Ky., is the entire story.

Colley has sent a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, asking him to come to Piketon for an open meeting with residents and workers.

Colley and Mary Byrd Davis, who runs Uranium Enrichment Project for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute in California, said the reports of plutonium at Piketon were well-documented and virtually ignored.

They cited a 1978 engineering report on oxide conversion -- the recycling of spent uranium fuel rods to produce more fuel -- that mentions the presence of plutonium and neptunium in the processing system of Piketon's X-705 building.

Colley raised the possibility that there was plutonium or other highlyradioactive material in that building and others at the Piketon plant during a 1993 public meeting.

The Energy Department and Martin Marietta Energy Systems, the operator of the plant at the time, held the meeting to discuss corrective actions and environmental restoration projects at the plant.

On a videotape of the meeting, Jeff Hedges, representing Martin- Marietta and the United States Energy Corp., acknowledged that "very low levels of transuranic contamination'' had been found in the decontamination facility of the X-705 building.

Transuranics are elements such as plutonium that have atomic weights higher than uranium.

Hedges said safety measures were implemented, including plugging drains in the building and changing safety clothing requirements. He said the material was outside the X-705 building.

However, Colley read from a report that indicated transuranic contamination had been found in two large process buildings.

T. David Taylor, Martin Marietta's manager for environmental restoration and waste management site operations, saidHedges had referred only to locations outside the process pipeline system when he said the highly radioactive materials had not been found in other buildings.

"I am telling you, you have a real serious problem,'' Colley said. "You need to tell your workers and you need to (do something) about these buildings.''

Among the thousands of documents Colley has collected about the Piketon plant is a 1957 letter from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union to the state health department, citing an unusual number of deaths and illnesses among workers.

"We beg of you . . . to have a complete investigation,'' union President C. A. Romaine wrote. "This request comes as a last resort to get something done down here!''

A copy of a July 29, 1977, letter to the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration discusses safe conversion of uranium oxide contaminated with transuranics. Colley's copy is unsigned but bears a stamp saying the original was signed by G.D. Althouse for Goodyear Atomic, operator of the plant at the time.

The letter said the company wanted to proceed cautiously with uranium oxide processing: "We will increase the scope and frequency of our monitoring (1) to assess the buildup of transuranics in workers' bodies and (2) to determine whether levels of transuranics discharged to the environment are acceptable.''

A 1977 report mentioning the possibility of plutonium at the Piketon plant also is cited in a 1996 letter sent by Cincinnati attorney Louise M. Roselle to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

"In 1977 the plant wrote that trace quantities of transuranics were probably being released to Little Beaver Creek without any monitoring of these materials,'' Roselle said. Her law firm, Waite, Shneider, Bayless and Chesley, has handled lawsuits involving the plant and its workers.

Plant worker Owen Thompson told a Dispatch reporter in 1991 that he had worked for nearly two years in an operation in which spent fuel rods containing plutonium were ground up, mixed with uranium oxide and burned to recover usable uranium. He also described working in contaminated areas with inadequate protective gear and being blistered by hydrogen fluoride.

At the time of the interview, Thompson had undergone surgeries for removal of two brain tumors.

He has since died.

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Pantex blames crash on batteries

By JIM McBRIDE Globe-News Courts Writer August 20, 1999 4:51 a.m. CT
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/082099/new_crash.shtml

Weapons experts and Pantex officials suspect two mock warheads used in airborne training exercises crashed when their parachutes failed because of dead batteries.

The mock warheads, called joint test assemblies, are simulated weapons without nuclear explosives and carry electronic stockpile monitoring equipment during flight tests or training exercises.

Pantex completes final assembly of all test assemblies, but weapons laboratories, such as Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, sometimes produce certified subassemblies for them, officials said.

In one case, Sandia and Pantex officials determined that a parachute on one of the dummy warheads failed last year because two expended batteries were placed in the unit by mistake, a government report shows.

In June, experts examined the damaged unit to find out why its parachute did not deploy during a military training exercise in 1998.

Officials from Sandia earlier opened a "significant finding investigation" into why the parachute did not open during the test. Because the batteries lacked electrical power, the test assembly could not send an electronic signal to deploy the parachute.

The error occurred when dead batteries from a previous program were accidentally placed back into inventory and tracked electronically as "good parts," according to a report of the incident.

Jim Elfelt, acting department manager for engineering and design at Pantex contractor Mason & Hanger Corp., provided written answers to questions about the incident.

Elfelt said the assembly, a mock B-61 bomb, was used in a military training exercise, primarily to give air crews a realistic bomb-dropping scenario. Scientists also were collecting a small amount of data on the system's reliability.

"'The unit was damaged beyond repair because of the hard landing," Elfelt said in a statement.

Such training exercises and more sophisticated tests give weapons scientists detailed information about how a weapon acts during flight and how actual stockpile bombs would perform, officials said. The test flights are conducted at secret locations.

Another B-61 test unit also suffered a similar parachute failure this year that could be linked to battery problems. A full investigation into the incident also is planned, Elfelt said.

"We suspect that the cause of the recent parachute failure may also be related to the JTA (joint test assembly) batteries, but this will have to be determined through the investigation," he said.

Elfelt pointed out, however, that different sources are used for B-61 war reserve bombs - those needed for the nation's nuclear arsenal - and that officials have no reason to believe a similar problem exists in the stockpile.

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Pentagon Defends Missile Decision

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer, August 25, 1999 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/WIRES/WPOLITICS/tCB00V0926.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Missile-Defense.html

WASHINGTON--Despite a senior official's objections, the Pentagon is defending its decision to skip another test of an experimental anti-missile missile and to move to the next stage in the interceptor's development.

After six initial failures were followed by two recent successes, the Pentagon is satisfied little would be accomplished by additional tests of the experimental version of its Theater High Altitude Area Defense system, known as THAAD, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The decision to move ahead was made over the objections of Philip E. Coyle III, director of operational test and evaluation for the Pentagon.

Coyle, commenting in the current issue of Defense Week, a trade publication, said the two successful tests, carried out at the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, differed from conditions of a real attack.

He recommended more tests at a different, larger test range.

"That's his job. His job is to give his opinion," said Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin. She said the Pentagon didn't always follow the advice of its analysts, however.

As to skipping an additional test, she said, "We stand by what have said in the past," which was that it was time to move to the next phase.

The Pentagon so far has spent about $4 billion on the $15.4 billion project.

The Army announced last week that it was ending tests on the experimental version of the missile, satisfied that it had resolved most of the problems that plagued the first six tests.

Instead of conducting another test of the prototype missile later this year, the Army's contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., will begin engineering a more advanced version to be fielded by the Army in 2007.

The interceptor has a range of about 800 miles and is expected to complement the shorter-range Patriot 3 missile, the latest version of the missile used against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

After the first six failures in a row, the anti-missile recorded its first successful hit in June, followed by another Aug. 2.

But Coyle, responding to written questions by Defense Week, said the flight test was "shaped and scripted" so the collision would occur in a relatively small area of the sky and so the debris would not fall in areas where it might do damage, he said.

He said more realistic tests could be obtained if moved to the larger Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands.

Coyle was out of town and his office said he was unavailable for comment on his statements.

THAAD is the centerpiece of the Defense Department's effort to provide missile protection abroad for U.S. and allied troops and their staging areas.

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Pentagon's Wish List: Based on Bygone Battles?

By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 25, 1999; Page A03
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/25/119l-082599-idx.html

As the fall budget-crunching season approaches, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have put aside their traditional rivalries to stand together in defense of full funding for the Air Force's favorite new jet, the F-22 fighter. The battle over the plane's supersonic capabilities and its supernumerary costs promises to absorb the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin Corp. and Congress. But underneath it all lies a much larger question: Is the U.S. military still building and buying weapons the way it did during the Cold War?

The basic problem, congressional critics and some defense analysts say, is that even in a time of uncontested U.S. military superiority, the Pentagon continues to develop ever more sophisticated and expensive weapons for large conventional battles instead of devoting greater resources to new missions, such as peacekeeping, and new threats, such as biological terrorism.

Both the Clinton administration and leading Republicans are calling for higher defense spending. But second thoughts about some big-ticket items have begun to grip even ardent defense supporters in Congress.

"There's no doubt that there are other weapon systems, already in the midst of the procurement process, that we ought to be looking at again," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the Appropriations defense subcommittee, who has led the move to delay F-22 production. "I'm not making a list per se, but I believe the Pentagon knows it's not going to be business as usual in the months ahead."

Lewis may not have a list, but it would be pretty easy for Congress to come up with one.

Take the Army's plans to buy more than 1,000 Crusader artillery systems for about $17 million apiece. At a time when U.S. ground forces are supposed to be getting lighter and more easily deployable, why is the Army building a 55-ton howitzer?

Or the Navy's planned fleet of $2 billion New Attack Submarines. With Moscow's once-menacing sub-building program virtually at a standstill, why is the United States embarking on another generation of underwater vessels?

Or the Pentagon's plans to spend $3.5 billion on nine new antiarmor weapons. Does the military really need more tank-killing armaments, given that U.S. inventories remain about as large as they were during the Cold War, and the threat of a massive Soviet tank assault on Western Europe has evaporated?

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen has acknowledged the need for a shift away from Cold War weaponry toward equipment designed for new kinds of warfare as well as peacekeeping and counterterrorist operations. But the Pentagon still concentrates on buying a few major weapons in large numbers, particularly the types of systems--supersonic jets, large warships and heavy weapons for ground units--that evolved during the 40-year standoff with the Soviet Union.

Pentagon officials justify new models of such weaponry as essential to maintain an edge over regional aggressors. The ability of Third World adversaries to produce high-tech weaponry, officials say, has been greatly enhanced by the ready availability of off-the-shelf gadgetry once possessed only by the military, such as night vision equipment, satellite-assisted locating systems and multi-spectrum communications gear.

Military commanders warn against rushing to the conclusion that the world has changed enough to dispense with tanks, submarines and fighter jets. Both Iraq and North Korea, the two countries that factor most frequently in U.S. military planning for regional conflicts, have large land armies with Soviet-style equipment.

"There is an emerging pattern that bothers me, that we're getting ourselves lulled into a sense of complacency, as we did after the Second World War," said Lt. Gen. Paul Kern, who oversees Army acquisitions. "We are not very good at predicting what the threats will be, but the world has proven to be not a very safe place."

Besides, defense officials say, much of the planned new surge in procurement--from $45 billion a year in 1997 to more than $68 billion by 2005--represents an effort to catch up after a decade-long "procurement holiday" in which military equipment purchases plummeted far more than other Pentagon accounts.

Still, there is a growing consensus within the defense community that the military may be planning to buy more than it can afford.

Notwithstanding commitments by both the White House and Congress to increase military spending over the next few years, many defense specialists doubt the extra money will materialize, given the prospect of large tax cuts. Pentagon projections, too, of big savings from more base closures and other efficiency measures are widely considered overly optimistic.

Moreover, various independent studies--including one in 1997 by a congressionally chartered blue-ribbon panel--have taken the Pentagon to task for failing to focus sufficiently on such emerging threats as terrorism, biological and chemical attack, and assaults on the nation's computer systems.

"The Pentagon and other groups are beginning to outline the new challenges, but we haven't identified ways in which we're going to go about meeting them," said Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a Washington think tank that closely watches defense spending. "And yet we're moving ahead with major purchasing decisions. That's really putting the cart before the horse."

The rise in U.S. military procurement also runs counter to international trends. Economic troubles, for instance, have scuttled most of Russia's plans to upgrade military aircraft and naval systems. In January, Russian authorities faked the unveiling of a purported new stealth fighter meant to compete with the F-22, rolling out a plane that turned out to be an ordinary model built for testing engines.

"Most of the rest of the world appears to be spending substantially less on weapons procurement today than it was during the 1970s and 1980s," observed a recent CSBA report. "In 1997, the most recent year for which data are available, the value of arms deliveries to the Third World was only about 60 percent of its 1974-89 average."

The General Accounting Office, in a report last month criticizing the number of new antiarmor systems being financed by the Pentagon, noted that the number of tanks and other armored vehicles in potential conflict areas has fallen to less than 20 percent of what it was in 1990--when U.S. war plans still centered on defending against a massive land attack across Central Europe.

And yet, the Pentagon is spending $11.1 billion on 10 different antiarmor weapons now in production, plus $3.5 billion to develop nine new systems, including a lightweight, shoulder-fired weapon called the Predator; a launcher to sit atop a Humvee; and an antiarmor submunition that the military calls not just "smart" but "brilliant" because it uses acoustic and infrared seekers to home in on enemy vehicles from miles away.

"Plans to acquire large quantities of new and improved antiarmor weapons do not appear consistent with the reduced size of the armored threat and the existing large and capable inventory of antiarmor weapons," the GAO concluded in a report prepared for Lewis.

Rebutting those findings, George Schneiter, the Pentagon's director of strategic and tactical systems, complained that the GAO failed to account for the obsolescence of many stockpiled weapons. He said the new weapons would be more effective in piercing the latest kinds of armor and more precise in targeting enemy forces, helping to minimize U.S. and civilian casualties.

Another weapon struggling for justification is the Army's Crusader, a motorized, highly automated new cannon. Both the House and Senate Armed Services committees objected to it last year, contending that the weighty vehicle did not fit the Army's own plans for a more agile force.

Army authorities appear to have quelled the opposition for now. They say the weapon, which promises to move quickly across a battlefield despite its weight, will fire farther than existing howitzers and require smaller crews to operate. But many of the cannon's features involve technological firsts that are still being refined.

Too often, say some of the Pentagon's leading critics, the armed services are rushing weapons into production before confirming that critical technologies can work.

"The problem stems from letting some perceived threat drive everything," said Lou Rodrigues, who directs GAO studies of Pentagon acquisition programs. "By contrast, in commercial programs, knowledge of essential technologies becomes the driving factor. So, for instance, if you want to develop a plane with new avionics, you prove the avionics first because that's going to be a pacing element."

More than the Air Force and Army, the Navy is credited with maintaining a sense of economy and pragmatism in its modernization program. Last year, it scaled back plans for a new aircraft carrier design, opting to stay with the basic Nimitz-class model for now. And its New Attack Submarine represents a slower, smaller boat than the ill-fated Seawolf. The Navy is halving the size of its submarine fleet but says it still needs about 50 boats to conduct intelligence-gathering missions and other special operations around the world.

Nonetheless, at $1.9 billion a copy, even the revised attack submarine isn't cheap--a fact that Navy officials say reflects, in part, the collapsing economies of scale as production drops from about four boats a year to a planned rate of one or two.

And as cost becomes an increasingly important factor in the design of new weapons, the Cold War notion that U.S. weaponry needs to press the outer limits of technology is itself being called into question.

"This philosophy of going as fast as we can technologically," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist with the Brookings Institution, "that's the mentality we were in during the Cold War when we had a serious rival. But now that we don't, the question is: Can we make a conscious decision to slow down a little bit?"

There are other arguments, too, for slowing down. At a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting last month, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) noted concern in some quarters that the technological dominance of U.S. weaponry might itself be destabilizing by inducing the Russians, Chinese and possibly others "to swagger, threaten [or] take precipitous action."

"It's an interesting theory, but the converse strikes me as rather absurd--that we should deliberately define superiority down," Defense Secretary Cohen replied. "The notion that we would somehow hold back and that we would allow others to catch up by our dumbing down our systems and not investing in the most sophisticated research and development and procurement . . . I think would be contrary to the national security interest of this country."

In Development: The Crusader

The Army wants to build 1,100 Crusader self-propelled howitzers at a cost of $22 billion*. They would replace Paladin artillery.

Weapon: 155mm howitzer
Range: 40+ km
Rate of fire: 10 rounds per minute
Resupply boom: Transfers up to 60 rounds of ammunition, fuel, lubricants and water to the self-propelled howitzer in less than 12 minutes.
Road speed: 67 km/hour
Cross-country speed: 48 km/hour
Cost: $16.7 million
*Deployment: 2005
Crew: 3
Cockpit is protected from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
* In 2005 dollars

SOURCE: United Defense

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Factory fire emits caustic cloud

Tuesday, August 24, 1999By JIM NICHOLS and SUSAN JAFFE PLAIN DEALER REPORTERS
http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/c24rmi.ssf

ASHTABULA TOWNSHIP - The explosive combination of air and a dangerous metal derived from common table salt ignited a factory blaze here yesterday that sent a plume of lung-searing fumes swirling over neighborhoods.

Fire officials said the fire broke out around noon at the RMI Titanium Co. sodium plant at E. 6th St. and State Rd. About three hours later, as the caustic sodium-oxide cloud hung over nearby homes, officials evacuated residents from about 10 lakefront streets near the plant....

The fire was out by 4:10 p.m., the cloud had cleared and the threat subsided. Ashtabula County Emergency Management Agency Director Ed Somppi declared an all-clear just before 5 p.m.

He and fire officials from Ashtabula and Ashtabula Township said no one was hurt....

Rick Mason, director of environmental affairs at RMI, said the fire started when workers handling pure sodium accidentally exposed some of the highly unstable metal to air.

Sodium is a soft, gray metal that can ignite spontaneously on contact with warm or moist air. Also, it can explode if wet with water because it reacts with oxygen. When it burns, it releases sodium oxide, a gas that can sear lungs and skin, burn eyes, and, at high concentrations, cause permanent injury or even death.

When sodium is being handled, stored or shipped, it typically is awash in nitrogen or argon gas, oil or other substances that keep air away.

RMI extracts the metal from sodium chloride, or common salt, Mason said. RMI sells much of the sodium it produces, he said, and uses some in making a strong, light metal called titanium, used in applications ranging from golf clubs to spacecraft....

The building that burned is one of three RMI Titanium facilities in the Ashtabula area. Another, an extrusion plant about a mile south, is contaminated with radioactive residue from its former mission - processing uranium into plutonium for nuclear weapons. A stream called Fields Brook runs across that plant's site.

Federal officials say the RMI Fields Brook plant is a significant source of the contamination that has landed the brook on the U.S. EPA's "Superfund" list of the nation's most dangerous toxic waste sites.

Somppi said there were no radioactive materials in the plant that burned.

Firefighters summoned at 12:04 p.m. could do little because they could not use water. So they watched the building burn as a heavy cloud of corrosive smoke blew out toward Lake Erie.

Somppi said emergency-management officials first told residents downwind along the lake to stay indoors with windows shut and air conditioning off. But he and fire officials decided to evacuate the residents when the wind shifted and carried the bulk of the plume over homes.

Rick Balog, Ashtabula city fire chief, said firefighters checked about 50 to 100 homes in an area about 1.5 miles square, and evacuated about 400 people.

Later in the afternoon, firefighters began dumping tons of salt on the blaze to smother it. By the time of the all-clear, the brick building emitted only gentle wisps of harmless smoke.

If the wind had blown a heavy plume into the city of Ashtabula and its 22,000 residents, "we would have been faced with a much larger and more complex evacuation problem," said Hugh Thomas, Ashtabula city manager.

"Two things helped: The wind direction kept steady, and the fire went out fast," he said. "It didn't last long."

Plain Dealer reporter James Lawless contributed to this article.
E-mail: jnichols@plaind.com Phone: (216) 999-4820
E-mail: sjaffe@plaind.com Phone: 1-800-275-5253