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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Praises success rate of SRS projects

Web posted August 22, 1999

Editor, The Chronicle

This is a belated response to your June editorial which, using clear eyed hindsight, was highly critical of the In-Tank Precipitation Process recently abandoned at the Savannah River Site.

All major facilities at SRS have involved first-of-a-kind processes requiring state-of-the-art knowledge and had to be based on scaling up small pilot plants or even laboratory experiments. Any time one tries a first-of-a-kind process one runs the risk of finding unexpected problems which may not show up until after many years of design and building.

When problems occur one has to decide whether to try to fix the problem or to abandon the process. One only knows after the fact what the best plan would have been. Further, over time, standards and levels of acceptable risk change. We accepted a much higher level of risk at the height of the Cold War than after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

The half-billion dollar cost of the In-Tank Precipitation Process needs to be judged in the context of the billions of dollars worth of projects that were successful, many well beyond the original design. For example, the reactor power was increased to 10 times the initial design and the separations facilities were so flexible that they accomplished many programs not dreamed of by the original designers.

In summary, doing new things means that some projects will not succeed. At SRS the success rate has been high and the failure rate small.

Don Hostetler, North Augusta