STAR On Millstone, B.N.L.

Standing for Truth about Radiation, the East Hampton-based group pushing for a permanent shutdown and complete cleanup of the reactors at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has turned its attention north to the chronically troubled reactors at the Millstone Power Station in Connecticut.

Friday night's meeting at Guild Hall, billed as a talk on the non-nuclear possibilities in Brookhaven's future, instead focused primarily on Millstone, the nuclear facility closest to East Hampton.

"We are so connected, your community and mine. . . . We've got a problem. You've got one and I've got one too," said Susan Perry Luxton, an activist from Waterford, Conn.

Just 15 Miles Away

She was a last-minute addition to a panel that included STAR's found ers, Dr. Helen Caldicott and Dr. Jay Gould, as well as William Weida, an economist who studies nuclear facilities, and Mary Olson, a Washington, D.C., antinuclear organizer.

Jan Schlichtmann, the well-known environmental lawyer from Massachusetts, was rained in at the airport, and replaced as moderator by Alice Slater of STAR's executive board.

Ms. Luxton told the audience of 75 or so they should be as concerned about the potential environmental and health hazards from the three giant reactors at Millstone as they are about contamination from Brookhaven, noting Millstone is just 15 miles away across the Long Island Sound. Brookhaven is twice as far, to the west.

Similar Histories

She and other panelists noted that, while their technology and size differ, the two facilities have similar histories. There have also been studies in each location that allege higher-than-average cancer rates are due to emissions from the facilities.

All three of Millstone's reactors were shut down within a five-month period ending in March 1996, after 20 years of accidents, safety violations, and retribution against whistleblowers. The climax came the previous August when a senior engineer disclosed a superheated nuclear core was repeatedly transferred to a spent fuel pool before the required cooling-off period.

Waterford and New London residents have long criticized the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission for not strictly overseeing safety operations at Millstone, which has undergone three changes in management in the past two years.

Ms. Luxton said she was not an anti-nuclear activist but founded a group called the Citizens Regulatory Commission two years ago to "make sure they follow the safety rules, and to make sure the N.R.C. enforces the rules."

Buckets And Rulers

Brookhaven's high flux beam reactor, the larger of its two reactors, was shut down a year ago after a long-delayed report about dramatically elevated levels of radioactive tritium in the groundwater. Last month, Federal investigators said scientists had used an unreliable method involving buckets and rulers to track the water level in a containment pool for spent fuel.

Their report said that, as a result, the lab failed for 12 years to identify a leak of six to nine gallons of radioactive water per day.

Like Millstone, the lab had for years been the subject of protests, accusations of safety violations and health hazards, and whistleblowers' reports. It was named a Superfund site in 1989, and now has radioactive and chemical contamination in the groundwater and soil.

Radioactive Water

STAR is supporting independent testing off the lab site, including in the Peconic River estuary. Dr. Gould noted that a state radiological study called the Peconic the most radioactive water body in New York.

Primarily a research facility, the lab is owned by the U.S. Energy Department. The department, like the N.R.C. at Millstone, came under fire for failing to oversee safety. It in turn fired the Associated Universities management group and awarded a new contract last month to a partnership of the State University at Stony Brook and the Batelle Institute.

"Quiet Incompetence"

However, lab critics are now predicting little will change, noting 11 of the 16 new board members were also on the Associated Universities board.

"We know who runs these places. This quiet Victorian incompetence is a lot of fun when it's covered with ivy," but potentially lethal in the arena of nuclear energy, said Dr. Weida, who heads the economic conversion project for the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment.

Ms. Luxton made a similar prediction about the new management at Millstone and the N.R.C.'s renewed promises of oversight. "They're no going to protect us. We have to protect ourselves," she said.

Cancer Rate

A Federal budget bill withholds the funding necessary to restart Brookhaven's reactor anytime in the next year, and Energy Secretary Federico Pena said he would decide over the next two years. Meanwhile, scientists inside and outside the lab have been lobbying heavily for it to restart.

On Tuesday, a panel of top U.S. scientists said operating the reactor is critical to the nation's competitive edge and indeed its capacity should be doubled.

Earlier this week, the Brookhaven National Laboratory Environmental Task Force, formed last year by the County Legislature to address health concerns, released data suggesting the East End's cancer rate was increasing dramatically and was about 17 percent higher than the rest of the county.

Debate Over Study

There has been considerable debate, including among task force members, over whether the study was flawed and whether the lab, or Millstone, or pesticides, was the main cause.

Dr. Roger Grimson, head of the task force and a Stony Brook epidemiologist, said the study indicated the lab was not a factor since the data showed lower rates in the adjacent neighborhoods. But, Ron Stanchfield, vice chairman of the task force and an East Hampton resident who joined the panel discussion Friday, said the considerable contamination from the lab - a radioactive plume in the groundwater is migrating off site - could not be ruled out.

The data, which breast cancer activists have said is inconclusive and needs more study, involved 5,172 cases in all of Suffolk and 455 on the North and South Forks, reported between 1988 and 1993.

Millstone A Concern

Dr. Caldicott, who is known internationally as an anti-nuclear activist and is now an East Hampton resident, said the 80 "filthy" sites around the lab that contain pesticides and fuel oil, as well as radioactive isotopes - cesium, strontium, and plutonium - have created a dangerous "synergism" for Long Island over the 50 years the lab has been operating.

"Now is the time I would expect to see those elevated levels of cancer," she said.

Ms. Luxton told Friday's audience that East End residents should also see the start-up of Millstone as an immediate health and environmental concern since Northeast Utilities is claiming it can meet all the conditions for a restart there by February or March.

Strontium Level Study

"Not to diminish the consequences from Brookhaven for the Long Island community, but that reactor is a mole compared to the reactors at Millstone," she said.

Brookhaven's is a 30 megawatt reactor that went on line in 1965. Millstone's outputs are 660, 1,870, and 1,155 megawatts respectively, from reactors that went on line in 1970, 1986, and 1975.

Ms. Luxton and Dr. Gould, an epidemiologist who lives in East Hampton, announced that he would take his study of the strontium level in baby teeth to Connecticut too. He has been collecting teeth from all over Long Island, especially from around the lab, but said Friday the endorsement of the Suffolk County Dental Society was crucial to success.

"It's the only way we can truly establish the truth," he said.

Taking the panel's anti-nuclear message beyond the metropolitan region, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service asked the audience to look "at the big picture." The situation around Brookhaven was no different than the areas around 40,000 contaminated sites worldwide, she said.

"When Chernobyl blew, it affected many countries, not just the Ukraine," she said, urging observers to become politically active. Several reactors around the country have been shut down, or are about to be, because of grass-roots opposition, including one in Oregon, two in California, and the Connecticut Yankee reactor in Hartford, she said.

And, in some cases, the shutdowns came about as an economic consequence of cleanups and safety conditions that grew out of community activism, said Ms. Olson.

No Long-Term Plan

She also announced that three of Long Island's legislators in Washington voted in favor of what she called the "Mobile Chernobyl" bill, which would make the transport of nuclear waste a taxpayer responsibility - without any long-term plan for safely storing the deadly waste, she said.

There are 50 million people living within a half-mile of the proposed transport routes, she said.

U.S. Representative Michael P. Forbes and Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who have called for a permanent shutdown of the Brookhaven reactor, voted in favor of the bill. U.S. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan did not.