New management has been assigned to the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant and work is being rescheduled after continuing safety problems. “Over the past few months, we’ve experienced a number of safety-related events that, while they didn’t cause any serious injury, are unacceptable,” said John Ciucci, president of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., in a message to employees. Organizational changes are being made to ensure safety remains the top priority during the remaining challenging work to prepare the plant for demolition, he said.
Tom Bratvold has been named acting vice president of PFP closure and will report to Ciucci. Bratvold has extensive Hanford experience and leadership in radiological control and safety, Ciucci said. Kelly Wooley will be the PFP deputy vice president and Tim Oten will be director of engineering. Employees who held those positions, including Vice President Mike Swartz, have been transferred to other projects. Swartz will report to Ciucci and will plan and execute demolition projects, including T-Plant ancillary facilities, the 165KE structure, and asbestos abatement.
Work at the plant will be rescheduled so that only one high-hazard project that requires workers to use supplied air respirators will be done at any time. “The mission is critical, but not at the risk of safety,” Ciucci said. Workers are size-reducing the last large and highly contaminated glove box in the main portion of the plant and finishing decontaminating the Plutonium Reclamation Facility canyon. Work also remains in the tank room of the Americium Recovery Facility. The goal has been to start tearing down the main portion of the plant this spring to have it demolished to slab on grade by a Tri-Party Agreement deadline of September. “We are rebuilding the schedule of PFP to align with this strategy of focused attention on the hazards of each step,” Ciucci said. “Our goal is to get PFP to slab-on-grade with zero safety incidents.” Work to prepare for demolition is very close to completion, he said.
Since the high-hazard work began in the summer there have been several incidents of worker skin contamination and very low levels of internal contamination. Department of Energy officials have called the plant the most hazardous facility to be demolished at Hanford, and the most complex work on it was left until last. The plant was used during the Cold War to convert plutonium in a liquid solution into solid pucks for shipment to U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. The plant also was used for special projects, such as recovering americium from radioactive waste material for possible industrial use and reclaiming plutonium from scrap metal to increase plutonium production at the peak of the Cold War.
One of the most recent contamination incidents was discovered in late December, after workers determined that radioactive contamination had spread into a control room at the plant. Workers displayed a “questioning attitude” and surveyed a long-unused control room next to the room where the last oversized glove box at the plant was being cut up, according to CH2M Hill. When contamination was discovered on the control room side of the door between the rooms, workers immediately exited the control room. They had no internal contamination, but a bioassay for a worker who had been in the room previously tested “slightly positive,” according to CH2M Hill.
More recently, a piece of contaminated equipment was shipped from the Plutonium Finishing Plant to one of the Hanford fire stations in January. The shipment occurred despite the discovery in December that contaminated vortex coolers had been shipped from the plant to a fire station. Respiratory equipment is routinely stored, serviced, and repaired at Hanford Site fire stations. Additional vortex coolers had been sent off-site to locations in three states for mechanical work, and two of those were discovered to be contaminated. Hanford officials have taken a significant look at how equipment is being released from highly contaminated facilities, Stacy Charboneau, DOE Richland Operations Office manager, told the Hanford Advisory Board. DOE also performed a survey of the fire station to make sure there was no radioactive contamination there. The piece of contaminated equipment that was shipped to the fire department on about Jan. 18 was a regulator that had been used with air-filled protective suits at the plant, just as the vortex coolers had been. Mission Support Alliance, the contractor in charge of the fire station, and CH2M Hill both called a stop to the transfer of equipment for about two weeks.
At the Plutonium Finishing Plant, seven employees requested bioassays to check for internal contamination after the issue with contaminated vortex coolers was discovered. All test results are in and all were negative, according to CH2M Hill. At the Hanford Fire Department, 106 workers requested bioassays, although some may not have followed through with the requests. Eighteen results have been received with just one of the tests positive. As previously reported, the test was for one of two employees who worked most closely with the vortex coolers.
