An environmental advocacy group focused on the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site issued a report last week that questions safety compliance at a commercial waste treatment facility, Perma-Fix Northwest, located just outside the former plutonium production reservation.
The report by Hanford Challenge claims the subsidiary of Atlanta-based Perma-Fix has “a checkered and worrisome history of environmental non-compliance.”
Perma-Fix Northwest runs a 35-acre commercial facility in Richland that provides treatment for both low-level and mixed low-level radioactive waste, much of it from the DOE Hanford Site, Hanford Challenge said.
The report asserts that over the years Perma-Fix has exceeded onsite soil contamination limits, improperly stored radioactive and other hazardous wastes, The company also mishandled wastes in a manner that resulted in plutonium leaks and workplace contamination. The facility manager also failed to notify regulators of known violations.
Officials from DOE, the Washington Department of Ecology and Perma-Fix could not immediately be reached for comment about the report on Monday morning.
The company was also fined a total of $551,891 from 2008 to 2019 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology for hazardous waste violations, according to the report.
There were two fires at Perma-Fix Northwest during 2019. In one instance in May, the fire alarm system was not working at the time of the blaze, and a person who was supposed to do an hourly check of the area failed to do so. A fire in December 2019 was a depleted uranium fire, involving 50 cubic feet of grout embedded with uranium metal scraps, which easily ignite upon exposure to air, according to the report.
The fires are a big deal because the Perma-Fix site is in a populated area, with over 32,000 people living within 5 miles of the facility in 2010 with over 25% under the age of 18, according to EPA data, the report said.
The report was provided by Hanford Challenge to the Seattle Times newspaper, which detailed the document in a Nov. 25 article.
The Times quoted Richard Grondin, executive vice president of Perma-Fix, as saying no worker has been overexposed since 2009. “We don’t claim to be perfect, but when regulators find something we don’t do right, we will correct it,” Grondin said. The company official also denied that the May 2019 fire at the plant resulted in a radioactive release.
