Weapons Complex Vol. 26 No. 22
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Weapons Complex Monitor
Article 13 of 14
May 29, 2015

At Richland

By Mike Nartker

DOE, EPA Agree to Extend K Basin Sludge Cleanup Milestones

WC Monitor
5/29/2015

The Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency have reached an agreement to extend Tri-Party Agreement milestones for getting sludge out of the K West Basin near the Columbia River. The agreement brings to an end a fine that had been accruing at the rate of $10,000 a week since shortly after DOE missed a milestone to begin moving sludge out of the basin by September 2014. The EPA agreed to cap the fine that DOE must pay at $125,000 because a tentative agreement was reached about 13 weeks after the fine started accruing.

The new agreement extends the milestone to start removing sludge from the K West Basin by four years to Sept. 30, 2018. The sludge must be removed under the new milestones by the end of 2019, also a four year extension. A total of 10 milestones were extended, based on the delayed start of retrieval of sludge. In addition, a new milestone was added to keep DOE on track to start sludge retrieval. It is required to complete installation of the sludge transfer equipment at the K West Reactor by the end of September 2017. Money to purchase the equipment is not expected to be available to get the installation completed sooner because of the federal budget cycle. “The agreement between the Department of Energy and EPA to change milestones reflects the agencies’ commitment to moving radioactive sludge away from the Columbia River to reduce the risk to the river in the next few years,” DOE said in a statement.

Sludge to be Moved to T Plant for Treatment

About 35 cubic yards of sludge are stored in underwater containers in the K West Basin about 400 yards from the Columbia River. Basins attached to Hanford’s K East and K West reactors were used to store irradiated fuel stranded when processing to remove plutonium stopped near the end of the Cold War. As the fuel corroded underwater, it combined with dirt and bits of concrete from the pools to form a radioactive sludge. The last of the 2,300 tons of fuel was removed from the basins in 2004. Since then, workers have been dealing with the sludge that remains, getting it vacuumed up and consolidated in underwater containers in the sturdier K West Basin in early 2008.

The next step is to get it out of the K West Basin, into transport containers and then moved away from the river to the T Plant in central Hanford until it can be treated for disposal. EPA already had extended deadlines for sludge removal numerous times, said a letter sent by Dennis Faulk, EPA Hanford program manager, to DOE in October. The deadline for having all the sludge out of the K West Basin originally was 2002, and that had been extended 13 years, the letter said. “I’m pretty confident they will be able to deliver this time,” Faulk said when the new agreement was announced. A mockup of the K West Basin has been built at Hanford’s Maintenance and Storage Facility to test processes and allow workers to practice with the tools that will be used for the work.

DOE Needs to Make ‘Some Real Progress,’ EPA Official Says

The K Basins should be one of DOE’s highest cleanup priorities at the site, said Rick Albright, director of EPA’s Superfund cleanup program in Seattle. “They need to make some real progress, rather than just explain missed deadlines, or they will face more penalties,” Albright said. DOE requested a milestone extension last fall, saying that insufficient money in Fiscal Years 2013 and 2014 was to blame for the missed Sept. 30 milestone. But EPA questioned why DOE had not proposed an extension until the deadline date, rather than when budgets were set in previous years. “EPA has consistently made clear to DOE EPA’s expectation that sludge removal work be funded and proceed,” EPA said when the extension was denied in 2014.

Getting the sludge out of the K Basins will allow other work to be done to clean up Hanford near the Columbia River. The K West Reactor Basin must be demolished and removed by September 2023 and soil cleanup under the basin must start shortly after that, according to the new milestones. By the end of September 2024, the K East and K West Reactors must be cocooned and other soil cleanup in the area completed. The new milestones also address treatment of the sludge for disposal, likely at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. A treatment and packaging technology for the sludge would need to be selected in 2022, a deadline extension of seven years. The delay could allow some efficiencies for DOE, which could be ready to treat some other waste to be sent to WIPP then.

 

CHPRC Removes ‘Atomic Man’ Glovebox From PFP

WC Monitor
5/29/2015

Hanford’s most notorious glove box has been dismantled. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. workers have removed the glove box that exploded Aug. 30, 1976, peppering Harold McCluskey with shrapnel — shards of glass, resin beads, nitric acid and americium-241. He survived, coming to be called Hanford’s Atomic Man. Years later he would give talks about the accident, demonstrating his lingering contamination by holding a clicking radiation detector up to the side of his face. The explosion happened in the tight quarters of the Americium Recovery Facility at Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant, where five glove boxes were used to recover americium from waste material for possible industrial or other use. It is one of the smallest facilities in the Department of Energy complex, but has been one of its largest problems, said John Silko, a DOE senior physical scientist.

When the WT-2 Glove Box exploded, it spewed radioactive material into the room. Photos taken after the accident show the floor scattered with broken glass, rings from the glove portals and resin beads that were being used in chemical work within the glove box. Some debris blew back into an adjacent glove box and more debris spread contamination throughout the control room.  “[What] was in the glove box now was everywhere,” said Mike Swartz, CH2M Hill vice president.

Getting the Plutonium Finishing Plant, where plutonium was made into metal pucks to be shipped off site for weapons production, ready to tear down has had many challenges, said Ron Skinnarland, of the Washington State Department of Ecology. But “this is one of the hardest parts of the job,” he said. Just four workers typically could be in what’s come to be called the McCluskey Room at one time. The aisle between the gloveboxes was just six to seven feet wide and workers were wearing new-to-Hanford protective suits. The puffy, air-filled suits keep workers cool and are pressurized to better protect workers. Work had to be carefully planned to make sure employees spent as little time as possible in high contamination areas. But there was no way to avoid the remains of the WT-2 Glove Box, which workers had to walk past as they entered the room until it was removed. “Every time they make an entrance, it is an experiment,” Silko said at a recent Hanford Advisory Board committee meeting. “They always end up with a surprise.”

In the WT-3 Glove Box, workers found 26 lead bricks stamped with the word “Battelle” stacked in a corner. They were covering up a spill that had left that part of the glove box radioactively contaminated. The bricks were removed one by one and that part of the glovebox was cut up and packaged individually. Work was done in 2010 and 2011 using economic stimulus money to remove two of the gloveboxes, which were numbered four and five. Efforts resumed in late summer 2014 to remove the next glove box, the one with the lead bricks. Then workers started on the exploded glove box, completing removal this spring. Just one glove box remains, WT-1, which has some of the debris from the exploded glove box. Work to remove it is expected also to be completed this spring.

‘A Heck of a Lot of Americium’

Inside the glovebox that exploded was a three-foot long steel ion-exchange column that held resin beads and about 136 grams of americium with 450 curies of radioactivity. “It was a heck of a lot of americium,” said Eugene Carbaugh, a senior health physicist for Mission Support Alliance at Hanford, during a recent presentation. The ion exchange column had been loaded before workers walked off the job on strike for four months. During those months, hydrogen gas built up in the column. On the night shift of the explosion, McCluskey had been instructed to add nitric acid to the column. He knew something was wrong when he heard hissing and saw brown fumes as he stood on a step stool in front of a leaded glass window, Carbaugh said. The gloves were warm to the touch, which was not normal.

McCluskey had just turned his head to warn a coworker, when an explosion peeled the column open like a Pillsbury biscuit can, Carbaugh said. It had enough force to break the windows and to bulge the sides and top of the glove box.  Debris, acid and americium sprayed the right side of McCluskey’s face. He received the largest recorded deposition of americium,” Carbaugh said. McCluskey was blinded from the acid that sprayed his eyes, and a coworker helped him walk from the room. A decontamination shower was available, but workers were afraid of what being sprayed with cold water would do to his heart. He had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery six months earlier. Instead, he was taken to a sink to have his eyes, face and shoulders flushed with water. An alpha radiation detection instrument was brought in, but his contamination was off its scale, Carbaugh said.

The area leading from the sink to a waiting ambulance was lined with plastic, and McCluskey was walked out about 90 minutes later. The ambulance also had been layered with plastic and the driver and two nurses were wearing full-face respirators. He was taken to a small decontamination building that had been constructed behind the Richland hospital, where he would live for 79 days.

Treatment Took Months

Much of the treatment McCluskey received would be standard today, Carbaugh said. But then a medication used to capture the americium in his blood stream, zinc DTPA, required an appeal to the Food and Drug Administration for investigative approval. It was granted in just five days. McCluskey would take it intravenously for the next four years.  He also was scrubbed with mild soap and water, doing much of the washing himself on his acid-injured skin. For four months, a medical team used tweezers to pick out pieces of metal, plastic, cloth and glass that worked its way out of his skin. The largest was a quarter-inch piece of glass in his eyebrow, Carbaugh said. “The decontamination was extended, extensive, difficult and it was never complete,” Carbaugh said. “That’s how he became known as the Atomic Man.”

By day 79 McCluskey’s medical team’s biggest concern was whether he would spread americium if released. He, his wife and his dog moved into a 20-foot trailer parked outside the decontamination building until officials deemed it was safe for him to return home to a nearby small town in January. “The medical treatment administered allowed him to live a reasonably normal life,” Carbaugh said. His eyesight was permanently impaired and he did not drive again. But the zinc DTPA kept the americium from concentrating in his liver and killing him through liver failure. McCluskey would die in August 1987 of congestive heart failure during a visit to western Washington. A pathologist, who initially did not know his history, found no malignancies in his body. Had McCluskey lived more than 11 years after the explosion it is possible he could have developed them, Carbaugh said.

The accident investigation found that the ion exchange column should not have been shut down while loaded with americium, Carbaugh said. Analyses were not done on changes to the process, including switching from aluminum nitrate to concentrated nitric acid for flushing and increasing the column loading from 15 grams of americium to as much as 150 grams. The excessive degradation of resin exposed to radiation led to an explosion when it was combined with the nitric acid, the investigation concluded.

Work Remains at PFP to Prepare for Demolition

With the last glovebox soon to be removed from the Americium Recovery Facility, workers will still have some final tasks to prepare the facility for demolition along with the rest of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Decontamination work remains in the facility’s tank room and piping gallery and in the control room. The contaminated materials and items removed from the facility will be packaged to be disposed of at Hanford’s Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility or at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

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