The U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has officially closed an 8-year-old recommendation that identified significant failings in the safety culture for the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) being built at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
“The Board has concluded that the Department of Energy has adequately addressed the underlying causes associated with the Board’s concerns. Therefore, the Board closes Recommendation 2011-1,” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in a July 30 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
Bechtel National in 2001 began building the vitrification plant that will convert much of Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive waste into a glass form for permanent disposal. Processing of low-activity waste is scheduled to begin by 2023, followed by treatment of high-level waste by 2036.
In the original June 2011 finding, the board determined that the “prevailing safety culture at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant is flawed and effectively defeats” a 1991 secretary of energy notice on nuclear safety policy.
The board cited two specific findings at the time: there was a “chilled atmosphere” that undermined the project’s safety culture, including management behaviors that “discouraged timely and effective resolution of safety issues”; and that both Bechtel and DOE’s Office of River Protection (ORP), which oversees the project, failed to deal with those issues, with personnel worried that speaking up could lead to retribution.
The Energy Department by 2015 had carried out a series of corrective measures to resolve the issues, including ORP forming the employee-driven Organizational and Safety Culture Improvement Council and the management-monitoring Organizational Safety Culture Advisory Group. The DOE office also established a new position of safety culture adviser. An employee concern program, covering both DOE offices at Hanford and all site contractors, was also initiated.
Similarly, Bechtel also established a nuclear safety and quality culture program and assigned specific safety culture responsibilities to particular jobs at the Waste Treatment Plant, among other steps, the DNFSB said.
However, DNFSB staff identified four areas where work remains to ensure the safety culture improvements continue, according to its report. These include management engagement by Bechtel National and improved surveys of safety culture issues by DOE and its contractor.
