PHOENIX — The operator of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina intends by the end of March to fully resume normal operations following a September 2015 safety incident that led the contractor to order a nearly company-wide suspension of work that lasted for two months.
As work resumed in November, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions facilities were first placed into “deliberate operations” in which the pace of work was slowed and placed under greater oversight. These facilities — including the Savannah River National Laboratory, H Canyon, and other operations — were over time individually shifted back to what SRNS President and CEO Carol Johnson on Wednesday called “enhanced operations” — standard functioning, but incorporating lessons learned from the incident.
Only HB Line, a unique chemical processing system used to prepare plutonium and uranium materials for disposal, remains in deliberate operations. “We do anticipate that here in the next couple of weeks that HB Line will exit deliberate operations,” Johnson said here during a panel discussion at the 2016 Waste Management Conference.
Reports in late February indicated HB Line would graduate out of deliberate operations early this month. SRNS, though, is still “proceeding as expected,” spokeswoman Barbara Smoak said by email on Wednesday.
The Sept. 3 incident involved three workers and a first-line manager who were moving and recanning plutonium in HB Line. While this is a routine procedure, in this case it involved a non-routine collection of samples for study at the national laboratory.
While carts built specifically to carry special materials, and prevent any nuclear criticality danger, were available, the workers consciously chose to put the materials into a “pail” that was not approved for this type of work, Johnson said.
SRNS Project Manager Bill Giddings indicated the workers cut corners to meet a self-imposed schedule to complete the project that day rather than have it carry over to the next workday “Let’s get this finished today and we don’t have to do it tomorrow,” he said during the panel.
Johnson said SRNS took immediate personnel action after the incident came to light, but she could not discuss the specific response to the four employees.
SRNS self-reported the event, then halted all nonessential nuclear and non-nuclear work. It undertook a massive assessment to determine how it occurred and how to prevent similar potentially dangerous breakdowns in procedure. There were multiple factors, according to its root-cause analysis, including a willful violation of procedure by the four workers, an unwillingness to call a “time out” to reconsider their decision-making, and inadequate first-line manager performance and management engagement.
The months-long, and ongoing, efforts to assess and address the failure has been similarly multifaceted, Johnson said. They include management meetings with all 5,300 SRNS workers in both large and small group settings, reviews of procedures, taking steps to ensure workers adhere to procedures, and increasing managers’ presence in the field, and additional training for first-line managers, among many others. A number of reviews by managers, DOE headquarters, and external experts have been conducted.
All nuclear facilities had to undergo a serious vetting process before being allowed to exit deliberate operations, including management assessments of a facility’s status, corrective action review boards to study those findings, review by a board of senior managers, and finally a “head nod” from DOE headquarters, Johnson said.
The analyses have uncovered some unexpected findings, according to the CEO. While regular surveys prior to the incident suggested the site had no major safety culture vulnerabilities, the HB Line event suggested otherwise. There had also been some drift from procedures over the years. Management is working to address these challenges, and to hire personnel in areas of need, including procedure writing and training.
The scrutiny is highest for HB Line, with more focused conduct of operations reviews and a more extensive study of corrective actions, according to Johnson. Apart from being the location of the incident itself, the facility had only lifted in August of last year a “safety pause” initiated in February 2015 after it was found that agitators in one nuclear waste holding tank had not been functioning since an electrical interruption the month before.
Johnson said the cost of the operations suspension has not been determined. SRNS wants to catch up on project milestones at the Savannah River Site, but not at the risk of safety, she said. “It’ll cost what it costs to do this right and safely and meet our objectives.”
