The Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General said there is not enough vetting of respirator maintenance for environmental cleanup workers at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, which increases the chance of employees being exposed to radioactive contamination.
Decontamination and decommissioning contractor Fluor-BWXT has over 1,300 employees who rely on respirators as part of the work at the former gaseous diffusion plant complex, according to a report dated Oct. 20 and recently posted on the Office of Inspector General (OIG) website.
The Portsmouth prime contractor needs to double-check more than just 25% percent of the respirators it gets back from its cleaning subcontractor, OIG said in the report, one in a series on certain DOE Office of Environmental Management sites.
The Office of Inspector General identified a couple of significant weaknesses. It found that a cleaning subcontractor, Massachusetts-based UniTech Services, was not in compliance with its requirement to ensure equipment such as full-face air purifying respirators did not contain radioactive contamination. UniTech sent respirators back to the prime that were contaminated to levels above what is allowed in the contract.
Secondly, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s mitigating controls were inadequate as a second line of defense. The prime contractor did six audits of UniTech between 2016 and 2019 but certain problems kept recurring, the OIG found. Such issues were not logged by Fluor-BWXT in the departments Occurrence Reporting and Processing System.
In addition, the prime contractor did not always ensure respiratory protection equipment was safeguarded due to an insufficient inventory system to prevent theft or lost items, according to the report.
“Management generally concurred with our recommendations,” and is taking corrective actions that should be done by Dec. 31, OIG said in the report.
While DOE’s Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office identified much of the respiratory problems at the site in late-2018, the measures taken were not enough to fix the “root” causes, the OIG said in the report.
