City Council Wants More Study of MIT Reactor

Although a commission made up of Cambridge health and safety officials found the safety precautions at MIT's nuclear reactor more than adequate, the City Council Monday asked its own Science Advisory Committee to review the matter further.

Following a Boston Magazine article on the safety of research reactors, the council asked Cambridge officials last December to study whether MIT's five-megawatt reactor was vulnerable to outside attack. The facility uses a highly enriched form of uranium which can be used for bombs.

When a group led by Cambridge's Emergency Director David B. O'Connor studied the facility, they found that "any successful attack on the facility would be quite improbable," O'Connor said.

But the Council Tuesday passed a motion introduced by Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci which asked the Science Advisory Committee, headed by Tufts Professor Sheldon Krimsky, to study further the reactor's safety. Krimsky could not be reached for comment yesterday.

In the course of examining the reactor's vulnerability, O'Connor, Cambridge's fire chief, the city's police chief and its health commissioner looked at documents from MIT, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a study by Martin Hirsch. Hirsch teaches at the University of Calfornia at Santa Cruz and is an expert on nuclear research reactors, O'Connor said. They also visited the plant on March 24.

The study took more than six months because federal regulations require clearance for anyone who wants to look at security procedures in a nuclear reactor.

The commission decided that "the armed personnel [who would respond to an attack are] appropriately equiped and trained," O'Connor said.

In addition, the commission decided the reactor's fuel emits so much radiation that "before anyone could get any [uranium] out of the building, they would be dead or dying," O'Connor said.

But the associate director of the 28-year-old MIT facility, Lincoln Clark Jr. '41, said that the commission did make one suggestion which has since been incorporated into the reactor's security procedures. He declined to say what the suggestion entailed.

The MIT reactor, which is the second largest research reactor in the country, operates at atmospheric pressure and at a temperature of only 140 degrees Farenheit.