Hanford contractor fined for safety violations

YAKIMA – The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday fined Fluor Hanford Inc., the primary cleanup contractor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, $206,250 for violating the department’s nuclear safety requirements.

The Energy Department manages cleanup at the highly contaminated south-central Washington site, which was created in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion.

In notifying Fluor Hanford of its intent to issue a fine, the department cited a series of violations that occurred at the Plutonium Finishing Plant over a two-year period between September 2003 and July 2005. The notice also cited several recent and more significant criticality safety issues, “which are representative of long-standing criticality safety deficiencies dating back to 1996,” the department said in the statement.

“We want our contractors to identify and address safety issues before they become more serious problems,” John Shaw, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for environment, safety and health, said in a statement. “Our goal is to have work conducted in a manner that protects workers, the public and the environment.”

Beginning in 1949, the Plutonium Finishing Plant was the last step in converting plutonium nitrate solutions into pure plutonium “buttons” about the size of hockey pucks, which were sent to other Energy Department sites to make atomic bombs. The work stopped in 1989 at the end of the Cold War.

Early last year, workers completed a project to stabilize and package the last remaining 4.4 tons of plutonium – a project that was considered one of three critical cleanup problems at Hanford.