The Department of Energy and several other parties on Wednesday signed a settlement agree to a 3-year-old federal lawsuit seeking better protection from chemical vapors for workers at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The agreement, if approved by the court, would freeze the case as Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) makes further improvements to better safeguard personnel from vapors associated with radioactive waste held in underground tanks.
“Under this agreement, the cycle of exposure and illness due to unprotected chemical vapor exposures is finally being addressed and, hopefully, resolved,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) called it a “good … agreement to help keep our workers safe while they deal with the rigorous demands of cleaning up the site.” Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said the settlement agreement achieved the results he hoped to achieve at trial.
The former plutonium production complex holds 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste in the tanks. Washington River Protection Solutions is charged with managing the waste until it can be processed for permanent disposal.
Hanford workers have complained of symptoms such as shortness of breath, headaches, nosebleeds, coughing, and a metallic taste in their mouths after exposure to vapors. Some tank farm workers are said to have developed serious respiratory and neurological illnesses, sometimes after decades of work, including the brain disease toxic encephalopathy.
In September 2015, the state of Washington, watchdog group Hanford Challenge, and Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598 sued DOE and WRPS.
The improvements required in the settlement agreement include continued testing and possible implementation of the first system at Hanford to destroy chemical vapors. If testing proves out, the technology could be in use in three years at the tank farms, according to Ferguson. The NUCON International system pulls tank vapors through filters into combustion chambers that can greatly reduce chemical concentrations. Filters would trap other harmful chemicals, including mercury.
Testing also is underway on a Strobic Air vapor control system that uses a high-velocity fan to mix chemical vapors with air and then expels the mixture from a stack at high speeds above workers’ breathing zones. Other settlement directives include improvements to monitoring and evaluation of hazard controls for waste-disturbing activity. The Energy Department said WRPS has already installed public address and event notification systems in the tank farms to provide immediate notification of possible vapors to workers.
The Energy Department must pay the state and Hanford Challenge $925,000 for their costs in bringing the lawsuit, Ferguson said. Washington River Protection Solutions must also sustain current safety measures, including supplied air respirators for most tank farm work, in place and improve the release of information on vapor events and worker health monitoring.
There was no immediate word on when Judge Thomas Rice, of U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, would rule on the agreement.
The settlement agreement is contingent on U.S. District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson granting a state and DOE motion in a separate lawsuit over the consent decree that governs environmental remediation at Hanford. The parties will ask for extension of certain milestones for retrieving waste from some single shell tanks. The motion has not been filed and details were not available this week.
Before the plaintiffs filed suit, DOE said in February 2015 it would implement 47 vapor-safety recommendations made by a team of independent experts, led by DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. The wide range of recommendations included new ventilation systems, more monitoring and investigating technology that could destroy chemical vapors.
Plaintiffs have argued that 19 separate reports have analyzed the Hanford chemical vapors since the 1980s, and that resulting improvements, such as requiring supplied air respirators for a few months or years, have not lasted. “We should not have had to file a lawsuit,” Ferguson said. “It should never have come to this.”
The Energy Department said in a statement that worker safety is its top concern. Washington River Protection Solutions, in conjunction with DOE and in cooperation with the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC), an umbrella group of 15 unions doing work at Hanford, “continues to take a very conservative approach to protecting workers from potential exposures to chemical vapors. The settlement agreement is based on and reinforces this ongoing effort,” DOE said.
Ferguson pointed out that in the year after the lawsuit was filed 60 workers reported suspicious odors or symptoms that could be linked to chemical vapor exposure. However, the number of reports has dropped as the use of supplied air respirators has increased. The Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council issued a stop work order in July 2016 unless its workers were wearing supplied air respirators in tank farms, with some exceptions when the risk of vapors being present is very low.
On Tuesday, a worker in the SX Tank Farm, where asphalt is being laid to provide a temporary protective cover over contaminated soil, reported suspicious odors. The worker, who was not wearing a supplied air respirator for reasons that were not immediately clear, was given a precautionary medical evaluation and cleared to return to work, according to WRPS. It was the first such incident since June 21.
Settlement talks began after Rice in November 2016 denied the state’s request to order increased protections for Hanford workers until the lawsuit was decided. He ruled workers already were being adequately protected by the requirement for supplied air respirators. But the judge also made clear that he was not buying into DOE arguments debunking Hanford employees’ claims of illnesses. Although workers might not currently be at risk, “the court does not deny that vapor exposures have occurred or that employees have experienced serious vapor-related illnesses, he said.
This month, Rice agreed to push out the trial date until September 2019, which was the 11th time the trial had been rescheduled, in most cases to allow settlement talks among the parties to continue. The trial date stands, should DOE and WRPS not meet the terms of the agreement.
