A federal safety watchdog reports there were two mishaps in radioactive waste storage areas last month at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, including one where a container of radioactive waste fell four feet.
Both incidents, one on Dec. 10, and another Dec. 20, occurred at Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). In the latter, a box containing mixed low-level radioactive waste dropped four feet “during a routine loading operation” and landed on the ground.
Tests confirmed the box did not leak any of its radioactive contents, the DFNSB said in a staff report dated Jan. 6 and posted late last week on the board’s website. The box slid off the tines or blades of a “telehandler,” which is a piece of equipment akin to a forklift.
“An additional inspection will occur once operators reconfigure the box since its current position makes one side visually inaccessible,” according to the DNFSB report.
Meanwhile, there was no radioactive waste involved in the earlier incident, on Dec. 10, when a piece of equipment fell during unloading, according to the DNFSB report. A gate for a spent fuel pool prematurely slipped off the back of a flatbed trailer, damaging the floor of the cask receiving area.
“Unloading the gate involved easing the flatbed trailer on which the gate was loaded forward a few inches while the gate hovered above the floor,” according to the DNFSB report. “When moving the flatbed trailer forward, the tractor pulling it drove farther and faster than anticipated, causing the pool gate to hit the floor and damage two sections of the floor surface, each measuring approximately four inches by four inches.”
Workers involved with the gate unloading had not done this chore in the past 15 years, according to DNFSB.
“Personnel were not at risk in either incident,” a spokesperson for Jacobs-led cleanup contractor, Idaho Environmental Coalition, said in a Friday email. “In both cases, crews immediately stopped work, management conducted a fact-finding investigation, generated a lessons-learned report, and recovery plans were developed and implemented.”
Idaho Environmental Coalition takes these incidents seriously and also held a mandatory meeting after Christmas with all employees “to affirm our commitment to the safe execution of our work,” the spokesperson added.
The Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center was built in the 1950s as a chemical processing plant to recover usable uranium in spent fuel, and since the 1990s has been used extensively for long-term storage of nuclear waste until the containers can be shipped elsewhere.
