A worker at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., on Jan. 21 plunged 4 feet into an old septic tank he was attempting to dig out of the ground to clear space for plumbing that eventually will pipe liquid waste out of leaky underground waste storage tanks.
The man, a subcontractor for Hanford tank-farm prime contractor Washington River Protection Solutions, was not injured, a company spokesperson said by email Thursday. Medical personnel at Hanford cleared the man, and two co-workers who helped him out of the disused septic tank, to return to work the day of the accident. All involved were tested for radioactive contamination, and those tests “came back negative,” the spokesperson said.
There will be no further digging near the septic tank “until further engineering evaluations could be conducted to better understand potential hazards,” the spokesperson said. “Management is reviewing possible contributing factors to the event, discussing lessons learned and sharing them widely with the workforce to improve worker safety.”
One of the most contaminated sites in the DOE weapons complex, Hanford’s safety track record has been a subject of scrutiny in recent years, both at the tank farm managed by Washington River Protection Solutions, and at the site’s so-called vitrification plant, which is under construction by another DOE contractor and eventually will turn the waste in the tanks into a solid form for long-term storage.
Hanford’s tank farm stores more than 50 million gallons of radioactive waste left over from World War Ii and Cold War-era production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Washington River Protection Solutions monitors the tank farm under a contract with DOE’s Office of River Protection awarded in 2008 and which, including a pair of options worth a combined $2 billion or so, could be worth up to $7 billion through 2018.
Washington River Protection Solutions is led by AECOM, of Bethesda, Md., and EnergySolutions, of Salt Lake City. AREVA North America, the U.S. arm of the French power company, is a junior partner.
Besides monitoring the leaky tanks, Washington River Protection Solutions is also contributing to Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant, a portion of which is slated to open around 2022 to solidify low-level waste from the tank farm.
The consortium will build a pretreatment facility for the plant’s Low-Activity Waste facility. The pretreatment part of the facility will pipe in liquid from the tank farm, isolate less contaminated radioactive waste, and pump that waste on to the treatment plant to be mixed with glass in a process known as vitrification. DOE requested $73 million for this pretreatment facility in the fiscal 2017 budget request released Feb. 9.
The entire waste treatment plant, including the Low-Activity Waste facility, is being built by Bechtel National of San Francisco under a separate DOE contract worth just over $11 billion. Treatment of higher-level radioactive waste at the vitrification plant is not expected to begin until the 2030s, at least.
