Radiation Exposures and Close Calls at Hanford

Health and safety conditions at the Hanford nuclear reservation have been receiving quite a bit of attention lately -- most of it bad. The Hanford workers are empying underground tanks containing 53 million gallons of radioactive and dangerous chemical waste. They're turning the radioactive waste left from the past production of plutonium into a more stable glass form for disposal.

Last month, a worker died in a fall and about the same time, NIOSH issued a Health Hazard Evaluation stating that there is

a potential for significant occupational exposures and health effects from vapors released from the hazardous waste-storage tanks," and that "vapor constituents may be present at sufficiently high concentrations to pose a health risk to workers.

A couple of days ago, the Tri-City Herald reported that

Two near-miss accidents at the vitrification plant under construction at Hanford led the Department of Energy to call for improvements at the end of June.

While the accident rate at Hanford is lower than the national average, a number of serious close calls are causing concern:

On June 22, a 100-pound piece of steel supposed to be embedded in concrete fell 40 to 45 feet, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report released Friday. It landed 8 feet from a worker.

Five days earlier, pieces of rebar fell when a "curtain" of crosshatched rebar was being lifted into the air by crane.

Other problems in late June included a worker who lost the end of a finger when his glove caught in a drill press, a worker who fell when a ladder slid out from under him and a worker who fell inside a wall of rebar.

The year had started with some other problems described in another safety board report. A 1,112-pound steel beam fell about 20 feet after the choker holding it contacted a handrail. The area had been cleared of people before work started, according to Bechtel National.

Also that month a stainless steel plate was dropped 8 feet and a section of telescoping brace was dropped 12 feet, according to the safety board.

Then yesterday, the Seattle Times reported that a Hanford employee suffered a serious radiation exposure after handling a radioactive piece of equipment without lead-lined gloves for protection.

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."

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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."

More Hanford Problems: DOE, Contractors Can't Get Injury/Illness Story Straight

Federal OSHA never fails to answer criticism againt the agency by boasting that injury and illness numbers have been falling steadily for several years. This may be good news, but is it accurate news. With the reports we hear of workers being encouraged not to report injuries, or being carted into work with broken limbs so that they aren't recorded as a "day away from work," can we believe the numbers.

Now we find that even the federal government is lying about workers injured on the job. The Washington Post reports today that:

The Department of Energy has failed to keep accurate count of worker injuries at nuclear waste cleanup sites across the United States, and its records often downplay the dangers of cleanup work, according to a draft audit by the department's inspector general

Not only that, but

The inspector general's investigation also found instances in which major cleanup contractors were not required by the department to report any information on how many workers were hurt or sickened while working around nuclear waste. It found that the department also fails to record a significant number of workplace injuries that contractors themselves have documented.

The most serious example was at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, where the main contractor, Bechtel, reported 463 days lost to injury. The Department of Energy's database listed 166 days.

The Department of Energy and its contractors at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State came under attack earlier this month for covering up work-related injuries and illnesses arising from exposure to toxic vapors.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) accuses the federal government of creating incentives for underreporting

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has said he will not tolerate any contractor behavior that endangers workers. But critics of the Energy Department say that the Bush administration, as part of its push for an "accelerated cleanup" of nuclear waste sites, has created financial incentives for contractors to cut corners on safety and underreport workplace injuries.

In many cases, those incentives involve extra cash for companies that work fast. CH2M Hill, for instance, can earn a bonus of as much as $2 million for each waste tank it empties by 2006.

The system also penalizes contractors -- by taking away as much as 10 percent of contract fees that in many cases run into the billions of dollars -- if they report too many workplace injuries.