The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not required to interview affected workers or record a March 1 public meeting about an incident last year that exposed 22 workers to radiation at a reactor near Richland, Wash., the regulator told one such worker’s lawyer on May 13.
The decision not to talk to any of the workers contaminated during the May 28 pipe-welding project that went awry during a scheduled maintenance shutdown of the Columbia Generation Station, “was a judgement call,” Mary Muessle, director of the division radiological safety and security for the NRC’s Region 4, wrote in a letter to Washington, D.C. labor attorney Billie Pirner Garde.
Garde represents exposed worker Shannon Phillips, a contractor from Washington state who was on the job at the Columbia Generating Station during the incident and laid off subsequently. Phillips complained of coughing, vomiting and vertigo for about two months after the botched job.
“In some cases, events involve contractor employees who leave the site prior to our inspection of these events,” Muessle wrote to Garde. “When this occurs, inspectors may use their professional judgment as to the need for direct interviews and may substitute alternative sources of information to inform our regulatory judgment. As was the case with the contamination event at Columbia Generating Station, inspectors used first-hand information provided through the licensee’s event investigation, dose records, dose assessments, surveys, and procedures to reach the conclusions documented in our January 13, 2022 Inspection Report.”
Energy Northwest operates the Columbia Generating Station. Phillips says the utility also did not interview him after the incident.
In a Jan. 13 report about the mishap, the NRC wrote that Energy Northwest workers did not follow written procedures and radiological rules during the pipe-welding project, resulting in radioactive particles becoming airborne during the welding work on a highly radioactive reactor-water cleanup heat exchanger.
Of the 22 exposed workers, one received a committed effective dose equivalent of 961 millirems while another received 711 millirems, according to the NRC report. Sixteen received doses of 1 millirem or less, most while passing the contaminated area. The NRC set a maximum exposure limit of 5,000 millirems per year, while Energy Northwest works with a 2,000 millirems limit.
Muessle told Garde that the NRC is still reviewing Energy Northwest’s root cause analysis of the incident, which the public power agency completed just before the March 1 public teleconference NRC convened with Entergy to discuss the radiation release.
