Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
9/25/2015
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions President and CEO Carol Johnson on Tuesday said 400 grams of plutonium placed in a container not marked for transport forced the Sept. 3 shutdown of the company’s nonessential operations at the Savannah River Site. The amount of material involved was not previously released. According to Tom Clements, director of advocacy group Savannah River Site Watch, who attended the SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) meeting at which Johnson spoke, DOE determined the issue was a violation of procedure, but not a nuclear criticality concern because the plutonium was sealed in 3013 packaging, which isolates stored materials from the outside environment.
The company-wide suspension of nonessential nuclear and non-nuclear operations was driven by the breach of safety protocols in management of plutonium used in the facility’s HB Line. The HB Line is a unique chemical processing system that works with plutonium in tasks including the production of feedstock for the planned Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at SRS.
SRNS spokeswoman Barbara Smoak said the company is rigorously investigating the nature of the problem before restarting its nonessential operations at the Department of Energy site. “What kind of schedule pressure were these people under? Were there other circumstances that led them to make these types of decisions? I’ve been in this business long enough to know that it’s easy to default to, ‘It’s the operator’s fault.’ And clearly they made a mistake. But we just need to understand the circumstances that are surrounding that,” Smoak quoted Johnson as saying at the CAB meeting.
The timeline for a restart of operations remains unclear, said Jim Giusti, spokesman for the DOE Savannah River Operations Office. “We’re waiting for the contractor to provide us their plans for delivered operations, and we’re going to do this very methodically,” he said yesterday.
