Workers’ health at risk at Idaho nuclear lab

Ted Lewis knew the plutonium plates at the government lab where he worked could leak potentially lethal radioactive dust.

He had seen it occur in the 1970s, when he was helping load some of those plates into a nuclear reactor at the lab near Idaho Falls. A steel jacket enclosing one of the plates somehow cracked, spilling plutonium oxide particles into the air. But Lewis and his colleagues were lucky — they were wearing respirators and given cleansing showers, so their lives weren’t endangered.

Three decades later, Lewis, an electrical engineer who had become chairman of the lab’s safety committee, had a bad feeling this could happen again, with a worse outcome. And he turned out to be right.

He tried to head it off. In 2009, Lewis wrote a pointed warning memo — he called it a white paper — and gave it to the official in charge of all nuclear operations at the Idaho National Laboratory, which is run by a consortium of private companies and universities under contract to the Energy Department.

The memo said the chance of encountering a plutonium plate that disintegrated, as Lewis had previously witnessed, was “greater than facility and senior management realizes,” according to a copy. Although Lewis said that a workplace manual published by the contractor — Battelle Energy Alliance LLC (BEA) — called the risk of an accidental spill of such radioactive dust “negligible,” he wanted his superiors to expect it and prepare for it.

Then, at 11:04 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011, Lewis’ fears came to life in a cavernous room at the lab where workers were readying some plates the size of Hershey’s chocolate bars for shipment to other federal sites and to researchers. The workers had a lead shield between themselves and the plates, but the table where they sorted the plates wasn’t sealed, and none of them had respirators on.

When a nuclear material handler named Ralph Stanton noticed that one plate’s container had a label warning that the plate’s corner was “swollen,” he asked a shift supervisor for guidance. The supervisor phoned one of the lab officials whom Ted Lewis had briefed on his worries, but after finishing the call the official told the workers to continue, according to an internal Department of Energy report in January 2012.

Sure enough, as the plate’s wrapping was pulled away, black powder leaked out, and Stanton, along with 15 of his colleagues in the facility, inhaled the plutonium dust, according to the report. Three of them wound up suing BEA, saying that they had been sickened due to the company’s negligence. BEA publicly disputed that the workers were harmed, but it also reached private settlements with each of the litigants that included nondisclosure provisions.

The contamination incident was extensively covered by two newspapers published in Boise, including the Idaho Statesman. But the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation shows it was preceded by two other serious instances of radioactive contamination at the lab as well as by Lewis’ careful warnings, and that it was also followed by two additional, avoidable radioactive contaminations there……..

Idaho National Laboratory is not unique. The government has been similarly generous to many of the other private contractors that operate key nuclear weapons-related facilities. Part of the problem, according to auditors at the Government Accountability Office, which reports to Congress, is that the Energy Department has too little staff, and poorly-trained contract managers, making it more susceptible to fraud and waste than most agencies.

The contractors largely police themselves, according to the GAO and inspector general reports. Penalties do not cause enough pain to act as deterrents, safety experts say. And — as might be expected — the contractors typically prioritize the mission-related responsibilities that bear directly and most strongly on their profits, according to current and former workers and accident investigation reports.

Plenty of warning that workers were at risk

Lewis’ “white paper” was not the only sign that BEA’s effort to prevent radiation contamination of its Idaho workforce were lagging………

Numerous problems contribute to the mass inhalation incident

Then came the radiation contamination of 16 workers on Nov. 8, 2011, which occurred in a white, mound-shaped building that was once home to a now-dismantled nuclear reactor and still has a massive vault resembling a walk-in freezer. It’s there that the government stores several metric tons of surplus plutonium, which the Department of Homeland Security and the NNSA use to help develop and refine radiation detection devices deployed by Washington at ports and border crossings around the globe.

Multiple physical shortcomings and managerial lapses combined to endanger the workers that day, according to the Energy Department’s report: The building had old and failing equipment, and no showers. Records of the plutonium plates’ individual histories — including previous damage — had been lost, and Lewis’ warnings that some were liable to turning to powder were ignored. Managers “did not recognize the significance of this information,” the report said.

Worse, the nearest air monitor was 15 feet from where the plates were being unwrapped. A vent supposed to draw dangerous fumes from the work area was partially blocked. And some of those doing the work “had no training on the hazards associated with Pu [plutonium],” BEA’s report said.

According to the lawsuits filed against BEA, the company at the time felt compelled to complete the work speedily. In interviews with the Center, Stanton said he was told it was a “bonus job,” meaning that meeting deadlines would help the company and its managers earn their profits. “DOE gives these guys a bonus. When the milestone is in play, safety is completely gone,” he said. “We were playing Russian roulette.”

Braase, a health physicist technician responsible for checking jobsite radiation and worker exposures, said in his own legal complaint that the work was accelerated so it could be completed before he went on a medical leave, allowing less time than usual for a careful review. BEA’s report on the accident, issued Sept. 17, 2012, said one of the factors contributing to the accident was that the company’s “focus is on getting the work done (the end justifies the means).”…

Health physicists consulted by the Center noted that the unusual circumstances complicate estimates of the potential consequences. If you inhale plutonium particles, they sit in the lung or get into the bloodstream and continue to radiate for a lifetime or until they are all are excreted. As a result, labs generally predict exposures and assign limits for this type of exposure over a 50-year period. Annual radiation limits for workers, in contrast, are pegged to short-term exposures from sources outside the body — like from an X-ray or series of X-rays……..

For this incident, and for the earlier radiation exposures that year of the three workers in the hot fuel facility, the DOE’s enforcement officer initially proposed fining BEA $615,000. But Boulden reduced the fine to $412,500 for what he said were “corrective actions taken.”

Separately, BEA’s profit was cut by $500,000 on Jan. 31, 2012, in a letter from Richard B. Provencher, the DOE’s fee awarding official, to Grossenbacher that noted “unacceptable events continue to occur” at the lab. But on Nov. 22, 2013, Provencher, who determines BEA’s annual profit, gave back the entire $500,000 that had been withheld, with the stipulation that BEA spend $100,000 of it on efforts to improve operations and safety.

In total, in 2011, BEA earned $17.1 million in profits, the year of the accident, or 92 percent of what was available. In 2012, it earned $16.2 million, but the next year it got the $500,000 back.

New contamination incidents

The plutonium contamination of 16 BEA workers was followed by two other significant radiation exposures, with the first occurring in August 2014, when workers in the Fuel Manufacturing Facility, a low structure next to the building where the plutonium exposures occurred, were fabricating radioactive americium in a glove box.

Outside the body, small bits of americium pose almost no threat to human health. But in higher internal doses, its radiation breaks down cells, alters genes and attacks bones and organs, increasing its victims’ chances of contracting life-threatening maladies, according tothe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…….

At the end of 2014, BEA was awarded $18.1 million in pure profit, after $350,000 was deducted for the two safety incidents. That meant the company got 97 percent of the maximum profit allowed under its contract. It also got its contract extended to 2019 without competition. A joint news release from BEA and the Energy Department announcing the extension credited the decision to the company’s “consistently strong annual performance and success in managing INL.”