One of the primary cleanup contractors at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has finished its assessment of the June spread of contamination during demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
The evaluation by CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation identified a need to augment the “work package hazard control set” and to improve measures for applying water and fixatives to mitigate the spread of radioactive materials, says a July 21 site report, made public last week, from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. “The evaluation also identified several contributing causes and proposes a set of corrective actions to address both the apparent and contributing causes.”
Additional details of the findings were not immediately available.
The contractor is managing teardown of the Hanford plant once used to mold plutonium into form for use in nuclear weapons. On the morning of June 8, workers were directed to remain indoors for over three hours after an air monitor identified low levels of airborne contamination.
Contamination was found to have spread outside the facility’s demolition zone, including on sidewalks, a station used for picking up respirators, and close to a vehicle access gate, according to reporting from the time. The incident caused no injuries or skin or internal contamination, a CH2M spokesman said.
Demolition to that point had exposed glove boxes in the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility during open-air demolition.
CH2M Still Waiting for Ruling on Idaho Cleanup Fee
Separately, CH2M said this month it continues to wait on a ruling from the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals regarding a $40.1 million fee the company believes a former joint venture is owed for cleanup at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory.
CH2M-WG Idaho (CWI) was the prime remediation provider at the facility from May 2005 to March 2016, succeeded by Fluor Idaho. CH2M owned half of the contractor, with the rest held by Washington Group International, which was purchased in 2007 by URS Corp. (which was itself purchased by AECOM in 2014).
The contractor determined that DOE’s December 2013 final fee determination was $30 million short of what it should have made for its base contract period from 2005 to 2012, according to CH2M’s Aug. 8 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
After a contracting officer rejected CWI’s claim for a total fee owed of $40.1 million in May 2014, the firm appealed to the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals. The board heard the case in April of last year, “and the post trial briefing phase is now complete. We are awaiting the decision from the Board,” the 10-Q says.
CH2M said the same thing in its previous 10-Q, filed in May. A company spokeswoman did not say whether management has any projected schedule for a ruling.
In any case, “information presently known to management” indicates the decision would not negatively impact CH2M’s financial standing, cash flow, or operations, the 10-Q says. The spokeswoman did not discuss details of that information.
Fluor Idaho’s contract, awarded in February, is worth roughly $1.4 billion over five years.