False Alarm at Purification Facility
NS&D Monitor
3/27/2015
Not long after resuming operations following an evacuation and three-month shutdown due to a chemical spill, Y-12’s Purification Facility—which produces classified Fogbank for nuclear weapons—was once again evacuated this week. This time it was a false alarm, though, and top officials at the Oak Ridge plant said the March 26 event showed the necessary responses for incidents and potential events were in place and showed the right amount of caution. “Some would argue that it’s conservative,” Bill Tindal, the Y-12 site manager for Consolidated Nuclear Security, said following the evacuation. “I’ll take conservative over anything else.”
The evacuation was announced over the plant’s PA system while Tindal and CNS President Jim Haynes were attending a labor-management conference in the plant’s New Hope Center. “My heart stopped,” Haynes said, admitting he worried that some of the repairs that took place following the mid-December spill of highly flammable acetonitrile might have failed or created some other problem.
‘We Live on the Edge Here All the Time’
Haynes was relieved when word came that the issue was a false alarm. According to Tindal, a sensor inside the Purification Facility apparently was activated during an operation in which a drum was being loaded and cleaned. “The alcohol wipe got a little too close to the sensor and set the sensor off,” Tindal said. Both Tindal and Haynes said they had confidence in the response systems in place. Haynes said alarms are part of managing a high-hazard facility. “We live on the edge here all the time,” Haynes said. “We’re operating a hazardous site.” Officials have not released much information on what took place in December, when the acetonitrile spill took place, except to say that “maintenance issues” were at least a contributor to the problem.
In a March 26 interview, Haynes provided a little more insight. He said there had not been sufficient preventive maintenance done at the facility prior to the Dec. 16 spill, and he said CNS made the decision to repair some equipment before restarting operations. “The only thing I can say is this was a facility that really had continued to operate for several years without doing enough preventive maintenance to ensure that we could continue to operate it,” Haynes said. He added: “Instead of putting an immediate fix in place [after the spill] and getting up and running in a few days like we expected, we decided to do the right thing. We did a pretty significant overhaul of some of the equipment to make sure that we fully protect our employees, and it took longer to do that. But we decided that was clearly the better approach. … That’s the approach we’ll always take here.”
