RICHLAND, Wash.—The federal government has fined a contractor at the Hanford nuclear reservation $302,500 for safety violations related to a spill of radioactive waste last summer.
The spill occurred July 27, when workers at the south-central Washington site were pumping the toxic waste from an underground tank. When a pump blocked, they tried to unblock it by running it in reverse, but 85 gallons of waste spilled onto the ground.
The U.S. Department of Energy, which manages cleanup at the highly contaminated site, said it was concerned about the delay by contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group in detecting the spill and also “long-standing engineering lapses” that led to the spill.
“It was only mere chance that prevented personnel from being directly contaminated by significant quantities of tank waste during the course of the event,” said a letter sent Thursday to the DOE contractor from the Energy Department’s Office of Health, Safety and Security.
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Cleanup costs are expected to top $50 billion.
Central to that cleanup is the removal of some 53 million gallons of residual radioactive and chemical waste—enough to cover 123 football fields, including end zones, a foot deep—from three decades of plutonium production for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The waste is stewing in 177 underground tanks, some of which have leaked into the aquifer and threaten the neighboring Columbia River.
The fine would have been greater, but the Energy Department reduced it by $192,500 because of CH2M Hill’s actions since the spill.
“DOE found your event investigation to be detailed and thorough and found your corrective actions to be appropriate,” the letter said.
However, the Energy Department remains concerned if corrections will be sustained in light of distractions caused by the end of CH2M Hill’s contract.
The department announced last week that Washington River Protection Solutions LLC had won the new contract to retrieve waste and close the tanks. The company will start taking over the job July 1, and officially takes over Oct. 1.
Englewood, Colo.-based CH2M Hill had held the contract for 11 years.
“We have a talented and experienced work force and have involved them at every level to make sure we all understand what happened and why,” John Fulton, president of CH2M Hill, said in a statement. “The corrective actions that we have taken since the incident have made us a stronger and safer operating company.”
The Energy Department already had withheld $500,000 from CH2M Hill’s pay because of the spill. The state of Washington also fined the Energy Department $500,000, though the two sides announced a settlement earlier this year. Under the agreement, half of that fine will be suspended in exchange for completing a list of corrective actions.
Work to clean up the spill is expected to continue through the end of September. Work has yet to resume to pump waste from older, leak-prone tanks into newer, double-shell tanks since the spill.
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Information from: Tri-City Herald,
