Hanford worker suffers radiation exposure

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Though officials say the worker should not suffer any health effects, the July 22 accident came just days after a federal report criticized oversight and monitoring of the Hanford cleanup and warned that some workers didn't have adequate safety gear.

A senior vice president at CH2M Hill, the contractor in charge of the $2 billion-a-year cleanup at the sprawling nuclear-weapons complex, yesterday blamed faulty planning for putting the worker in a dangerous situation while he was helping decommission a vault that once held radioactive waste. Dale Allen also said a supervisor should have stopped the work as soon as dangerous radiation levels were detected, but said the company had no plans to discipline him.

"We didn't expect to see such a high level," Allen said. "We didn't require leaded gloves, and we believe that to be a mistake."

There was no radiation released to the air, and no risk to the general public, said Al Conklin, health physics supervisor for the Washington Department of Health. "It happened right up-wind of one of our air samplers and we didn't see anything."

Tom Carpenter, of the Hanford watchdog group Government Accountability Project, said the incident reflects a tendency to put speed ahead of safety.

"It seems like the people in charge of safety are just being ignored and there's apparently no consequence for supervisors who do so."

Last month's report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also warned that hazardous vapors from waste tanks could pose a significant health risk to workers.

The state and the Department of Energy's Office of Independent Oversight and Performance Assurance have also issued stinging rebukes of the cleanup program's safety precautions this year.

The Department of Energy owns the Hanford site, which for decades produced plutonium for nuclear bombs. About 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 massive underground tanks. A work force of about 500 people is transferring waste from leaking tanks to more secure double-hulled tanks, with the goal of eventually converting the waste into a stable, glass-like material.

In the early morning hours of July 22, a small group of workers was removing a 36-foot instrument called a thermocouple from a 10,000-gallon tank housed inside a concrete vault, Allen said. The tank didn't appear to contain any liquid or solid waste, but had in the past.
 
When a crane had nearly lifted the thermocouple free, radiation detectors swung into the red, reaching their maximum readings.

All of the workers were dressed in protective gear, including non-lead-lined gloves, and were wearing respirators, Allen said, but the man who was guiding the thermocouple got a blast of radiation to his hands that measured 22 rem — well above DOE's permissible limit of 15 rem a year.

A rem is a unit that links the amount of radiation absorbed by human tissue to biological damage.

When a radiation monitor maxes out, or "pegs," standard procedure is to back away immediately, said Conklin, the Washington Department of Health official.

But in this case, the CH2M Hill supervisor opted to finish lifting the thermocouple out and load it onto a trailer.

"It would have been better to just have left it hanging there and backed away and come back with leaded gloves and different radiation controls," Allen conceded.

"There was some confusion on the job site and we're not trying to affix blame to anybody."

Instead, he said, the company plans to use the incident as a lesson to bolster its planning and safety efforts.

CH2M Hill did not identify the worker. And none of his co-workers received a significant dose of radiation, said John Swailes, the DOE assistant manager overseeing the tank-farm cleanup.

Because he has already exceeded the maximum radiation dose for the year, the exposed worker will be assigned to tasks that don't involve any radiation exposure, Allen said.

Federal regulations allow exposures of up to 50 rem a year, but DOE sets its own standards lower as a way to ensure workers aren't put in danger, Swailes said.

Carpenter said CH2M Hill should face a stiff penalty for what he views as negligence.

"You don't lightly pull something out of these tanks without really good precautions, and you stop when you run into danger."

And neither DOE nor the contractor notified the public of the incident, Carpenter said.

Allen and Swailes said there's no legal requirement to announce nuclear exposures, but CH2M Hill promptly notified DOE and state agencies.

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com