An environmental advocacy group’s report that questions safety compliance at the Perma-Fix Northwest waste treatment facility located just outside the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site is “very misleading,” a company spokesman said this week.
The report last week by Hanford Challenge claims the subsidiary of Atlanta-based Perma-Fix has “a checkered and worrisome history of environmental non-compliance.”
Perma-Fix Northwest runs a 35-acre commercial facility in Richland that provides treatment for both low-level and mixed low-level radioactive waste, much of it from the DOE Hanford Site, Hanford Challenge said.
The report asserts that over the years Perma-Fix has exceeded onsite soil contamination limits and improperly stored radioactive and other hazardous wastes. The company also mishandled wastes in a manner that resulted in plutonium leaks and workplace contamination. The facility manager also failed to notify regulators of known violations, according to the document.
Perma-Fix remains in “excellent standing” with state and federal regulatory agencies “and has the permits and licenses in place to compliantly maintain operations at all our facilities” including the one at Richland, Wash., spokesman David Waldman said in an emailed statement Monday.
In 2019, the facility near Hanford did have “two small fires that occurred during process activities, each were extinguished immediately with no property damage, environmental release, injuries, or spread of contamination,” Waldman said in the email.
During a fire in May 2019, Hanford Challenge said in the report that the fire alarm system was not working at the time of the blaze, and a person who was supposed to do an hourly check of the area failed to do so. A fire in December 2019 was a depleted uranium fire, involving 50 cubic feet of grout embedded with uranium metal scraps, which easily ignite upon exposure to air, according to the report.
The fires are a big deal because the Perma-Fix site is in a populated area, with over 32,000 people living within 5 miles of the facility in 2010 with over 25% under the age of 18, according to EPA data, the report said.
Hanford Challenge said in the report that the company was also fined a total of $551,891 from 2008 to 2019 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology for hazardous waste violations.
The fines primarily stem from operations prior to Perma-Fix buying the facility from the prior owner in 2007, Waldman said.
The report was provided by Hanford Challenge to the Seattle Times newspaper, which detailed the document in a Nov. 25 article.
The Times quoted Richard Grondin, executive vice president of Perma-Fix, as saying no worker has been overexposed since 2009. “We don’t claim to be perfect, but when regulators find something we don’t do right, we will correct it,” Grondin said.
“The Perma-Fix Northwest facility continues to provide the Department of Energy’s Hanford facility with safe and compliant alternatives to support acceleration of the removal and stabilization of radioactive waste that has threatened human health and the environment since the Manhattan project era,” Waldman said.
