Staff Reports
RW Monitor
6/27/2014
A rad-waste shipment that arrived June 12 at EnergySolutions’ Bear Creek treatment facility in Oak Ridge failed to pass a survey inspection and that resulted in a Notice of Noncompliance for the shipper, Philotechnics, a waste-management firm with offices in Oak Ridge and California. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said EnergySolutions reported the incident and declared that a survey detected an area on the underside of enclosed trailer that exceeded the 200-millirems-per-hour radiation limit of the Department of Transportation.
TDEC spokeswoman Kelly Brockman said the state’s Division of Radiological Health performed its own onsite investigation and confirmed that a small area underneath the trailer had a higher-than-allowed dose rate. Philotechnics was cited with noncompliance in a notice dated June 17. “There was no threat to workers or the public,” Brockman said in an email response to questions.
Bill Button, president of Philotechnics, said a survey of the shipment before it left the company’s Oak Ridge facility indicated that radiation levels were within acceptable guidelines. But he noted that the Philotechnics employee survey was done with a different type of instrument than the detectors used by EnergySolutions and the state. Therefore, it may not have gotten an accurate reading because of the ribbing on the bottom of the trailer, he said.
Button said this is the company’s first noncompliance. He said the company intends to take more conservative measures in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He said there was no contamination on the trailer and that the dose rate was based on gamma radiation from a waste container inside. If it had been identified initially by the company, the noncompliance could have been remedied by repositioning the container, he said. “The cause of the elevated dose rates underneath the trailer were a result of a package inside the trailer containing gallium-68 contaminated waste,” Brockman said. The radiation level at the bottom of the bottom of the trailer was reported to be 350 millirems per hour.
