Move Could Have Impact on Waste Shipments
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
5/30/2014
Quality concerns could soon impact the ability of Fluor-B&W Portsmouth, LLC, the D&D contractor for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, to ship some waste off-site for disposal. Late last week, FBP halted its Non-Destructive Assay program after a “routine assessment” found “potential quality questions related to the measurements used for transportation and disposal,” contractor spokesman Jeff Wagner said in a written response. “This data is compared to the transportation and disposal requirements to determine if the equipment is acceptable to ship. We are reviewing both the manually collected and computer-based data to cross-check the NDA data and determine if there could be an impact to future waste shipments,” he said.
According to Wagner, “less than 10 percent” of FBP’s total weekly waste shipments undergo the now-halted NDA testing. “There hasn’t been an impact to off-site shipments at this point,” he said. “The NDA data under review is from process gas equipment, specifically compressors and converters. These shipments could be released as scheduled on Tuesday, June 3 or we may delay them a few weeks until our NDA data is cross-checked.” FBP expects NDA testing to “restart in the next few weeks,” Wagner said. The Department of Energy’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office did not respond to requests for comment late this week.
Quality Concerns Led to Firings Last Year
Last spring, FBP fired 14 workers at the Portsmouth D&D project after an investigation found that records associated with radiation detectors had been falsified. The records appeared to have been changed to cover instances where the radiological monitors had been kept in service after failing a source check. FBP said at the time that there had been no evidence that contaminated items may have been improperly released from a radiological area as result of the use of detectors that did not pass source checks. That incident has been the subject of an investigations by the DOE Inspector General’s Office and the Department’s Office of Enforcement, the results of which have yet to be made public.
Wagner said, however, that last spring’s incident and the recent halt to the NDA program are “two very different cases in terms of the operations and how the need for possible changes were identified.” He said, “This is a good example of the system working and why DOE assessments and self-assessments are effective. We have confidence in people who run our NDA program but that doesn’t mean we won’t stop if there are questions or potential changes that should be made to the process. This review is looking at conduct of operations and how the data was gathered prior to analysis.”
