Workers Prepare to Enter ‘McCluskey Room’ at PFP
WC Monitor
7/3/2014
Hanford workers are preparing to enter and clean out the McCluskey Room at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, the site of one of Hanford’s worst radiological accidents. It still contains the glove box where a 1976 chemical explosion shattered the windows of the box and sprayed americium, concentrated nitric acid and shards of glass and metal into the neck and face of worker Harold McCluskey. McCluskey received 500 times the radiation dose considered safe, according to the Department of Energy. The room was too radioactively contaminated to be used again and was shut up for periods of as long as 15 years at a time before a serious cleanup effort began in 2010.
Workers used federal economic recovery act money then to enter the room more than 200 times wearing supplied-air respirators, said Mike Swartz, the vice president for the Plutonium Finishing Plant work for CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. They were able to remove two glove boxes with the money that was then available before returning to other cleanup work in the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Three of the McCluskey Room glove boxes remain, including one that stretches down the center of the room and the glove box that was damaged in the explosion.
New Protective Gear to be Used
When workers re-enter the room to finish the clean out, they will be in protective gear being used at Hanford for the first time. “The employees involved in selecting the equipment and training on the equipment are some of the most experienced employees at CH2M Hill and at Hanford,” Swartz said. They traveled to the Idaho Cleanup Project to check out the gear, which has been used there for about nine years. The suits should be safer and more comfortable for workers, and it could increase productivity, said Bryan Foley, acting DOE project director for the Plutonium Finishing Plant. “It creates a micro-environment for workers,” Swartz said.
Clean air is supplied by a compressor to the suits, both for breathing and to circulate cool air throughout the suit. Monitors check for radiation inside the suits and transmit information to a computer. The suits also have what Swartz calls “an escape pack,” a container with enough air to allow workers to leave the McCluskey Room if something goes wrong with their supplied air system.
In the gear used previously, workers could spend just 45 minutes in the room before having to leave. But the new system should allow substantially longer entries, making work more efficient. Workers will be sent in four at a time, with a support team of at least 15 workers to assist in dressing, undressing and monitoring in each carefully planned and choreographed entry into the highly contaminated area. Cleaning out the room to allow it to be torn down eventually is expected to take 10 to 12 months, Swartz said.
Room ‘Looked Like a War Zone’
Workers will disconnect and remove tanks still in the room and the three remaining glove boxes, each of them standing about 12-to-14 feet high. The largest, used as the valve line for the tanks, stretches 25-to- 30 feet down the center of the room. The other two, including the one McCluskey was working at, are about four feet deep and five feet wide, Swartz estimated. Lewis Robinson, a radiological control technician, described the McCluskey Room as “old, dilapidated, rundown” when he entered in 2010. “It looked like a war zone,” he said. Plaster on the walls was hanging off, he said.
The McCluskey Room is in the Plutonium Finishing Plant’s Americium Recovery Facility, which opened in 1964 to recover plutonium and americium from waste. On Aug. 30, 1976, McCluskey had reported to work on the night shift and was restarting a glove box after work had been stopped for five months due to a strike. He was on top of a ladder outside the glove box when he saw smoke and turned to leave. But the window of the glove box blew out, the result of resin degrading and reacting with nitric acid. He would spend much of the next five months in a windowless decontamination center in Richland and then a travel trailer parked just outside it as his health improved and radiation levels decreased.
McCluskey would later say that “of nine doctors, four thought I had a 50-50 chance and the rest just shook their heads.” But over 60 days, treatment with a chelating agent helped remove the major portion of americium from his body. He would receive more than 500 injections of the agent, which continued at least occasionally for years. He would die 11 years later at the age of 75 of a heart attack.
Room Expected to be Gone in 2016
By 2016, the McCluskey Room is expected to be gone. DOE has a Tri-Party Agreement milestone to have all of the Plutonium Finishing Plant reduced to slab on grade in 2016. Work has been underway since 2008 to prepare the plant for demolition by removing much of the equipment and infrastructure inside the complex that was once used primarily for weapons plutonium processing. Before that workers had spent nearly four years stabilizing and packaging nearly 20 tons of material containing plutonium that was left in the plant in various stages of production when it shut down. “There has been a lot of work done at PFP to get where we are today,” Foley said. “A small footprint of some tough stuff is left to go.”
