By: John Stang
Did luck keep a Columbia Generating Station radiation-exposure incident in May from being worse than it was? Or did good planning play a key role?
Those questions face Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials as they decide how much Energy Northwest should be blamed for a May 28, 2021 pipe-welding incident that exposed 22 people to radiation at the reactor north of Richland, Wash.
The issue was clouded Tuesday after Energy Northwest executives briefed the NRC in a virtual public meeting and an irradiated pipefitter involved with the incident said his health has deteriorated and that Energy Northwest, a consortium of state utilities, discouraged follow-up health checks.
The NRC has not made a decision yet on how to classify the incident — a determination that will affect how much the owner of the Columbia Generating Station reactor is at fault for the work errors and subsequent radiation exposures. The NRC set no timeline for that decision. Tuesday’ meeting was Energy Northwest’s opportunity to present its case that the incident was not as bad as declared by the preliminary NRC findings.
“The deficiency was more than minor,” Natasha Greene, a senior health physicist with NRC, said of the incident.
NRC preliminarily classified the incident as “white,” essentially a two out of four on the commission’s scale of successively more severe security and safety performance indicators.
In a Jan. 13 report, the NRC wrote that Energy Northwest workers did not follow written procedures and radiological rules during a May pipe-welding project while the reactor was shut down for routine maintenance. That resulted in radioactive particles becoming airborne during the welding work on a highly radioactive reactor water cleanup heat exchanger. Personnel performed the work on a nearby platform attached to some scaffolding, according to NRC’s report.
Of the 22 exposed workers, one received a committed effective dose equivalent of 961 millirems while another received 711 millirems, according to the NRC report. Sixteen received doses of 1 millirem or less, most while passing the contaminated area. The NRC set a maximum exposure limit of 5,000 millirems per year, while Energy Northwest works with a 2,000 millirems limit.
At the end of Tuesday’s virtual meeting, Shannon Phillips, a 50-year-old veteran pipefitter involved with the incident, said he was one of the contaminated workers and that he believed he received one of the higher doses recorded by Energy Northwest.
Phillips said Energy Northwest would not tell him the amount of his contamination. He said he volunteered to talk about the incident with Energy Northwest and the NRC but that he had talked with neither.
Jeremy Groom, the allegation coordinator and enforcement official for NRC Region IV who attended Tuesday’s virtual meeting, told Phillips that he would interview him.
In an interview with the Exchange Monitor, Phillips said he was one of the workers on the platform that day in May. He said a radiation protection technician was present throughout the procedure, during which NRC said workers cut into a pipe but did not properly use the prescribed glove bag and vacuum to contain escaping radiation.
A supervising plant technician charged with keeping constant watch on the workers did not call out the mistakes with the glove bag and vacuum, which should have been cause to stop the work, NRC wrote in its report.
It was another radiation protection supervisor, near a remote monitoring station some 40 feet from the work area, who noticed what went wrong with the glove bag and stopped the work, NRC said. On Tuesday, Energy Northwest said it was good planning to have that senior employee nearby.
But Greene said it was luck, and that “no credit is given for luck.”
Meanwhile, Phillips told the Monitor, a plug removed into the glove bag — which NRC said was improperly attached to the vacuum — was heavily contaminated and the source of radioactive particles that he inhaled. Phillips said no respirators were issued for the job and that he and others who requested them were overruled. Phillips also said that he wanted to have a medical checkup afterwards, but was denied that.
Phillips said he was laid off nine days after the incident. He still works as a pipefitter and plumber in the Richland area. He said he began suffering constant coughing, vomiting and vertigo about two months after the May 2021 incident.
