Brookhaven's Future

Brookhaven National Laboratory did not have much of a 50th anniversary last year, beleaguered as it was by critics who said it had polluted the Peconic Bays and spurred the spread of brown tide, which almost destroyed the bay scallop on the East End, and who also blamed it for the high incidence of certain cancers on Long Island.

Nineteen ninety-seven is looking even worse, following the revelation that radioactive tritium from one of its nuclear-research reactors has been seeping into and contaminating the groundwater for years.

The Federal Department of Energy, which runs the laboratory, seems at wits' end over how to stop the seepage. It is concentrating instead on figuring out how to rid the aquifer of the contamination, meanwhile insisting that the leaking pool that holds the lab's spent fuel poses no danger to the lab's employees or neighboring homeowners.

Some critics expect that in the cleanup process the Government will be forced to admit that the goings-on at the lab - the years of fixation on scientific breakthroughs at the expense of the environment - were unconscionable.

What is certain is that Brookhaven is finally paying the piper for too many decades of self-righteousness and too little self-policing. From within their 5,000-acre fiefdom, administrators for years put safety low on the priority list. A steel liner was recommended for the fuel-storage pool. None was built, nor did the pool have a leak-detection system. Monitoring wells were put in late in the game; eventually, the radioactivity in the groundwater was detected.

With Federal, state, and county investigators working in concert now at Brookhaven, perhaps the many questions that remain will find answers. In the meantime, the underground plume of tritium is spreading at about 10 feet a day, and the lab's neighbors are wondering whether they face a health risk.

Brookhaven's supporters should stop telling them, as they have been doing, that the amount of tritium leaked "is the same as that emitted by your television or cellular phone," or that a health risk "is extremely unlikely." Such responses echo and compound the errors of the past and certainly do not engender confidence for the future.

That that future seems less and less likely to include the kind of nuclear research the lab boasts of and more and more bleak for its 3,200 employees is the logical consequence of so many years of wanton disregard for the public safety.