Cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho expects to file a formal response this month to the Department of Energy’s proposed $580,700 civil penalty over an April 2018 accident at the Idaho National Laboratory where four drums of radioactive sludge overheated and blew off their lids.
“We are reviewing the preliminary notice of violation and considering our response, which we will provide to the Office of Enforcement before the deadline,” which is the end of this month, Fluor Idaho spokesman Erik Simpson said in an email last week when Weapons Complex Monitor did not publish due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
There was no word from Fluor-Idaho at press time as to whether the company as actually filed its response yet.
In a letter dated Nov. 20, Kevin Dressman who directs the enforcement office for DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, said the base civil penalty issued to Fluor Idaho, prior to consideration of various mitigating factors, is more than $1.41 million.
But DOE credited Fluor Idaho for its “thorough and robust” response to the accident and the investigation of its causes. In addition, the federal agency said it has already deducted $500,000 total from the contractor’s fee in fiscal years 2019 and 2020 in connection with the event.
With those factors taken into account, the remaining civil penalty assessed against the Idaho cleanup contractor is $580,700. Fluor Idaho has 30 days to either pay or formally contest the preliminary notice of violation, according to the letter.
The explosion, as the former chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Bruce Hamilton has described it, involved four 55-gallon drums of repackaged waste originally from the long-shuttered Rocky Flats pit-manufacturing facility in Colorado. The drums overheated and spewed radioactive sludge onto the walls and ceiling of a room within a fabric filter building at the lab.
No one was hurt in the accident in part because it occurred late at night while no workers were present in the fabric filter building, which DOE uses in waste repackaging operations, according to various DOE reports written about the incident.
Fluor Idaho had moved the waste into new drums after checking for possible ignition sources. Hours after the transfer, the waste overheated. Temperatures inside the four containers increased to about 150 degrees Celsius after depleted uranium contacted air for the first time in years. Also, material from the drums generated methane, a flammable gas.
“Fluor Idaho engaged both internal and external technical experts to determine the cause, employed national and private-sector laboratories to conduct an analysis of the waste constituents, and identified and completed the corrective actions,” Simpson said.
Changes enacted after the accident include trying to better vet what exactly is inside the old drums and observing the waste longer for signs of sparking before it is repackaged into new drums.
The contractor has completed recovery of the Accelerated Retrieval Project V facility where the accident occurred and processed the remaining waste requiring treatment there, the Fluor Idaho spokesman said. With new waste treatment and monitoring protocols in place, Fluor Idaho resumed sludge waste treatment in a nearby retrieval facility.
