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Hanford cleanup payment reduced

Spent fuel rods are stored in protected containers at the Columbia Generating Plant on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Energy Department has reduced pay to a cleanup contractor, citing failures. (File / The Spokesman-Review)
Associated Press The Spokesman-Review
Spent fuel rods are stored in protected containers at the Columbia Generating Plant on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Energy Department has reduced pay to a cleanup contractor, citing failures. (File / The Spokesman-Review)

RICHLAND – The U.S. Department of Energy will reduce by $1 million its payments to a contractor hired to clean up parts of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

The Energy Department first notified Washington Closure in April that it would lower its pay by at least $1 million because of the company’s failure to have a required safety plan in place. On Friday, the department notified the contractor that it would hold the reduction to the minimum amount, $1 million, because Washington Closure made improvements in safety and operations.

The reduction centers around a required safety plan, called the Integrated Safety Management System or ISMS.

“Your efforts during the last six months to implement an effective ISMS that is protective of the public, workers and environment is noteworthy and reflect both your and my personal commitment to safety,” wrote David Brockman, manager of the Energy Department’s Hanford Richland Operations Office, in a letter to Washington Closure President Chuck Spencer.

Spencer was named president in late January, following a string of problems in Washington Closure’s cleanup of Hanford along the Columbia River. Testing data was falsified at a radioactive landfill, radioactive tritium was tracked out of a radiological work area, workers had near misses with electrical safety, and sodium dichromate was spilled during cleanup work.

Spencer could see when he arrived that Washington Closure was not ready to move on to the high risk work on its schedule, he said in an all staff memo Monday. When he asked the Energy Department to delay approval of the required safety plan in April, he expected financial consequences, he said.

“Regardless, it was the right decision given that the safety of our employees was at stake,” Spencer told employees.

Washington Closure had the safety plan implemented by the end of October, but the Energy Department only recently completed verifying that it is adequate.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated site, with cleanup costs expected to top $50 billion.