New safety crackdown at Hanford
Two serious safety mishaps in August 1993 at the US Dept. of Energy's Hanford nuclear weapon complex in Washington state have again called the site's cleanup safety management into question. The latest incident, which shut down all nonessential work at Hanford's huge waste tank farm and has already sparked a site management shakeup, came as site officials held a conference at the complex to tout its environmental technology potential. In an unusual move, site management contractor Westinghouse Hanford Co. ordered the work stoppage on Aug. 12. It will affect at least 350 workers. The shutdown came two days after a worker employed by site engineer-contractor Kaiser Engineers Hanford Co. taped a rock to a rope and dropped it into a pipe in a high-level radioactive waste tank to determine if it was plugged. The breach of procedure was aggravated when he held the rock after withdrawing it from the tank, and was contaminated. Just days earlier, a Westinghouse employee accidentally turned on a test pump inserted into Hanford's so-called [open quotes]burping tank[close quotes] last month to stir and diffuse potentially explosive hydrogen gas. The brief accident did no immediate harm, according to officials.
- OSTI ID:
- 5571317
- Journal Information:
- Engineering News-Record; (United States), Vol. 231:8; ISSN 0013-807X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
CONTRACTORS
MANAGEMENT
HANFORD RESERVATION
RADIOACTIVE WASTE FACILITIES
SAFETY
ACCIDENTS
RADIATION DOSES
RADIATION PROTECTION
RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT
DOSES
NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
NUCLEAR FACILITIES
US DOE
US ERDA
US ORGANIZATIONS
WASTE MANAGEMENT
055000* - Nuclear Fuels- Safeguards
Inspection
& Accountability
052000 - Nuclear Fuels- Waste Management