Procedure not followed in Hanford incident
RICHLAND – Lack of discipline and failure to follow established procedures have been blamed for the spread of radioactive material outside a work area at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
The findings were announced last week following an Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department review of problems that developed Jan. 12 as workers were checking the last of four canisters of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, that were found in a burial area associated with two defunct reactors.
“It was very much a failure of conduct of operations on many fronts,” said Dennis Faulk, an EPA environmental scientist.
After there were indications that tritium had gotten into a specialty work trailer, radiological control technicians entered without taking precautions, such as wearing protective clothing, and then tracked the tritium into their own work trailer, investigators found.
The contamination was later cleaned up and officials have said no impact on worker health appears likely.
Chuck Spencer, who became president of Washington Closure Hanford the next week, has promised to emphasize the need to improve safety and follow established procedures.
Neil Brosee, who recently became deputy general manager of Washington Closure, which is cleaning up contaminated areas near old reactor sites along the Columbia River, told a committee of the Hanford Advisory Board last week that the tritium episode should have been avoided.
“I am out to change performance,” Brosee said.
Tritium was made on the sprawling Eastern Washington complex, now the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, in a pilot project for use in developing nuclear weapons.
The canisters were among 1,500 unearthed items that were categorized as anomalies by Washington Closure.
The first three were empty, and the fourth had open head valves, leading workers to the false conclusion that it also was not pressurized, and nitrogen was used to purge the canister, further adding to the impression that it contained no tritium, Brosee said.
When workers had trouble sampling the canister with approved procedures, however, they drilled a hole that allowed tritium to escape from the canister in the specialty trailer, he said.
Only only when the workers injected the contents of a syringe that had been inserted into the hole with an air sampler did they realize the canister contained tritium, Brosee said.
Such drilling was barred under their work plan, which also required that the canister be kept out of the specialty trailer, and the workers also should have used a fume hood or taken other precautions with the air sampler, EPA officials found.
Even worse, Faulk said, radiological control technicians entered the trailer to check for tritium without first donning protective clothing.
The trailer also should have been posted as a radiological area, and a written procedure should have been developed before workers entered the trailer.