The Navy had a serious mishap 16 years ago with the nuclear reactor inside one of its submarines, despite claims it had never had such a propulsion accident, private researchers charged Monday.
"The Navy had a major nuclear accident and then lied about it," asserted William Arkin, a researcher with the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think tank. "We caught them with their bell-bottoms down."The Navy denied it had ever tried to cover up news of the accident, describing it as a minor mishap in which "there were no serious injuries or radiological problems, the ship remained fully capable to perform any mission required of it and there was no damage to the reactor."
The service acknowledged, however, the incident had never been publicized, and spokesmen were unable to say why the sub's deck logs and official command history made no mention of it.
"According to the deck logs of the USS Guardfish for April 21, 1973, which we obtained, the submarine was `under way submerged as before' for the entire day, without incident," Arkin said.
"In fact, the submarine suffered a primary coolant leak . . . and then surfaced, ventilated, decontaminated and repaired its reactor unassisted. Five crewmen were later sent to the Puget Sound, Wash., Naval Hospital for radiation monitoring."
Willis S. Rich, the sub's skipper at the time and now a professor of engineering at Boston University, said in an interview about the report that had he noticed there was nothing in the log about the accident, he would have told the navigator to add the information.
"It was a minor mishap," he said. "Nobody was injured. But it was a primary coolant leak and you can't take that lightly."
Arkin and Joshua Handler, a researcher who heads the Greenpeace environmental group's Nuclear Free Seas Campaign, released their findings Monday. The Institute for Policy Studies and Greenpeace are about to publish a study of serious naval accidents around the world.
Earlier this month, the two researchers disclosed new details about the loss of a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Japan in 1965.