"The sponsors decided that the site for the new laboratory would have to be as near to New York City as possible, be at least ten square miles in area, and have no direct drainage into drinking-water reservoirs-this last requirement was to avoid the possibility of contamination from radioactive waste."

So explained Dr. Glenn Seaborg, former chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in a recounting 27 years ago how Brookhaven National Laboratory came into existence.

His explanation underlines a basic problem involving BNL: for not only is it in a location that drains into a drinking water supply, it sits atop Long Island's underground water table, its sole source aquifer.

Few populated areas of the United States depend exclusively on an underground water supply for their potable water. Most commonly, areas receive potable water from rivers and other surface water.

Long Island is an exception, getting its water from an aquifer below ground. That means that what seeps into the ground from the nuclear machines or waste sites at BNL -including the three nuclear reactors that have operated at the facility--moves down into the underground water table.

This is what has been going on with the radioactive tritium that has been oozing for 12 years, BNL officials now acknowledge, from the spent fuel pool of BNL's biggest BNL reactor, its High Flux Beam Reactor. The tritium has migrated into the ground and then into the groundwater.

It is what has been occurring with other radioactive poisons, including Strontium-90, Cesium-137 and the deadliest radioactive substance of them all, plutonium, that has been seeping from waste sites at BNL.

Why was a national nuclear laboratory with a variety of nuclear devices that could and have emitted radionucliides sited on top of a sole source aquifer?

Dr. Seaborg, in an essay entitled "Brookhaven, An Adventure in Scientific Reseearch," included in a book of speeches by him and written on the 25th anniversary of BNL's founding, relates that "to understand how Brookhaven got started, we must go back to those exciting and rather confusing days in 1945 when World War II suddenly ended with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"In August 1945 we had seen how nuclear energy could be used for destructive purposes," says Dr. Seaborg. "The atomic scientists" then wanted to see how "our wartime accomplishments" could be used for civilian purposes, to pursue atomic research.

Set up out of, mainly, the secret laboratories which were part of the Manhattan Project, the World War II crash program to develop nuclear weaponry, was a string of "national laboratories."

The Manhattan Project laboratories, however, were all situated inland-out of a concern for coastal invasion during the war-and none was in the Northeast of the United States and taking advantage of the major universities of the Northeast.

"The idea of a Northeast laboratory resulted from some preliminary discussions centered at Columbia University in the autumn of 1945," relates Dr. Seaborg. "The sponsors envisioned as the central facility of the new laboratory a large nuclear reactor suitable for physical experiments, the production of isotopes, and the irradiation of reactor components."

New Jersey was seen as the likely location. Indeed, notes Dr. Seaborg, the grouping of Northeast universities that was seen as running the Northeast national laboratory-Associated Universities, Inc.-"was incorporated in New Jersey on July 8, 1946, since at the time there were more prospective sites in that state."

How did Long Island get selected instead?

On Long Island was an old Army post, Camp Upton, "a training center during World War I and both a reception center and a convalescent hospital in World War II" and the "entire reservation was scheduled to become surplus property" in 1946, says Dr. Seaborg.

The government wanted to get rid of the Army post and "since the entire reservation was scheduled to become surplus property, there would be no restrictions on selection of the area to be developed, and already existing buildings and facilities could be used," says Dr. Seaborg. "The site was near New York City, yet the immediate area was then thinly populated. There was plenty of water, and there was the added advantage that the Long Island sand was an excellent foundation for heavy construction."

Not a mention that this sand would also allow virtually unimpeded migration of spilled radioactive waste into the groundwater below.

Indeed, there is no mention at all by Dr. Seaborg that BNL was being sited on top of an underground water table, a sole source aquifer, despite the concerns of placing the planned national laboratory in any location with "direct drainage into drinking-water reservoirs."

There sits a central predicament for BNL-and for we Long Islanders.