Nuclear Plant Blast Sparked Chaos, U.S. Says

A chemical explosion at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation that released plutonium and other hazardous chemicals was followed by a near-complete breakdown in emergency response, exposing workers to a toxic plume and leaving outside authorities unaware of the danger until hours after the event, a government report concluded Friday.

In a series of extraordinary admissions, the Department of Energy and Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc., manager of the huge nuclear site in central Washington state, detailed a series of failures in almost every link of the emergency-response chain at Hanford’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility.

The Energy Department not only admitted the chemicals that exploded in a storage tank on May 14 were improperly stored but said workers were ordered outside a trailer to walk through a toxic plume, had to drive themselves to the hospital four hours after the event and did not have their radiological tests scrutinized until a month after the accident.

The report, stunning because of the number of failures detailed at the nation’s largest and potentially most dangerous nuclear repository, paints a picture of a late-night chemical explosion followed by hours of apparent chaos in which workers were given conflicting orders, procedures for emergency response were nonexistent or ignored and there was no early notification to civilian authorities despite the fact that a public highway traverses the site about two miles from the plant.

“The findings of this report are not good. In fact, they’re downright ugly. We failed in some key areas of responsibility. Across the board, our actions in the wake of the explosion did not meet our high expectations,” said Lloyd Piper, the Energy Department’s acting manager at the plant.

In addition to the response breakdown, Fluor Daniel was scored for failing to conduct any regular monthly inspections on the volatile storage tank since Oct. 28--despite a nearly identical accident with a similar mix of chemicals at another site last year.

“We’re not happy with this report. In fact, we’re very angry about it, not because we question its facts and conclusions, but because we know they’re as accurate as we can make them,” said Mike Yates, Fluor Daniel’s executive vice president at the plant. “We have an obligation to protect our workers, the public and the environment. The report tells us we are inadequate in our capability to do so. That’s going to change.”

The 560-square-mile reservation, which produced plutonium for nuclear weapons for four decades, now contains more than half of all U.S. nuclear weapon wastes and is considered the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

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The accident occurred when a 400-gallon storage tank at the Plutonium Processing Facility blew up, blasting through the roof and an outside door, sending a toxic plume through the smokestack and allowing plutonium-contaminated water to spill outside the plant.

The tank contained a plutonium stripping agent known as hydroxylamine nitrate and gaseous nitric acid, which are toxic but not radioactive. The plutonium release is believed to have occurred when a broken water line swept over contaminated chunks of flooring and out of the facility.

Hanford officials emphasized that they believe no one was exposed to radioactive or toxic materials in unsafe amounts or for unsafe time periods. They do not believe that anyone off-site had any exposure, and they said the toxic plume appears to have dissipated before it reached the public highway.

But advocates for eight construction workers and two other workers who may have been exposed say there is no way of knowing what exposure there was because the workers were denied immediate medical care and were never properly tested for radiological contamination or exposure to heavy metals.

“When they have no idea of how many chemicals were released or how much, when you have the fact that Highway 240 was never closed off and people drove right through the plume about a mile away, how do you know? We will simply never know,” said Gerald Pollet of Heart of America Northwest, a watchdog group.

The Government Accountability Project, which has pushed for an independent investigation of the accident, said the Energy Department’s admissions of failure are inadequate when there is no assurance that anyone will be punished and no certainty that the same mistakes will not be repeated in the future.

“What we’ve seen is just a comedy of errors with tragic consequences,” said Tom Carpenter of the Accountability Project, which has represented whistle-blowers at the plant. “What if this were a huge release of radiation? They wouldn’t have known it. They were simply lucky here. They were terribly unprepared, and I’m not sure that next year they’re going to be any more prepared.”

The key concern of many probing the accident was the presence of eight construction workers on a break in a trailer outside the main plant when the explosion occurred.

According to the watchdog group that interviewed the workers, the explosion was followed by a notification on the public address system that all employees were to report to the main plant. When the workers in the trailer phoned in for instructions, they say they were told to go to the main plant.

They exited the trailer and walked through what the department now says was a yellow-orange plume of oxides of nitrogen and potential aerosols of nitric acid. Watchdog groups say the plume also could have contained plutonium, but the Energy Department says there is no evidence of that.

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The workers were turned back by a security guard and ordered to return to the trailer, only to be told by the shift manager, once again, to report to the main plant. They attempted to walk upwind of the plume, but the security guard ordered them back, forcing them to backtrack through the plume.

Once inside, the workers, who were complaining of lightheadedness and a metallic taste in their mouths, demanded nasal smears to measure radiological exposure. But the correct swabs were not available, and makeshift gauze swabs were used instead. In addition, another worker without protection gear was sent up the smokestack to test whether any plutonium had been released.

The workers realized that they would have to drive themselves to the hospital, and two of them had to walk unprotected back to the trailer to get their keys; one of them was assigned to help security guards put up perimeter tape, and while the guards were wearing breathing apparatus, neither of the other two workers were offered any protection.

When they drove to the hospital, all demanded blood and urine tests but were refused. No fecal tests for heavy-metals contamination were administered. Later, it was learned that their original nose smears weren’t examined until a month after the incident.

The Energy Department report does not contradict most of these details, and in fact outlines these failures in the emergency response, among others:

* Plant managers were unable to locate criteria for notification of outside agencies in the event of an emergency and did not declare an alert until two hours after the explosion. Though procedures require immediate off-site notification of accidents, that notification did not occur for the 10:15 p.m. accident until well after midnight. Other off-site agencies weren’t notified until three or four hours after the explosion.

* The orders for a complete lock-down and for all personnel to be accounted for were essentially conflicting orders that resulted in the mishap with the construction workers. Moreover, the lock-down was not properly implemented, and personnel reporting to work from home were able to gain access to the facility with no knowledge that an emergency was underway. Some crossed through as many as four security checkpoints with no warning that a take-cover order was in effect.

* The worker sent to check the smokestack should have been wearing protective gear, as should all workers who went outside. Protective breathing equipment was in some cases uncertified, and 28 of 36 breathing devices had not been subject to required biennial testing.

* Potentially exposed workers were not given access to emergency medical technicians, and even if they had been, there were no protocols in place to direct technicians about what to do after an explosion.

* No off-site notification for monitoring or plume tracking was conducted because there was no adequate hazard assessment for the plant. “The plutonium finishing plant did not understand adequately the hazards they had,” said Steve Veitenheimer, who headed the investigative team. “The plant was not prepared to monitor for outside contamination because they didn’t understand what was in their facility.”

Energy Department officials outlined an exhaustive set of new guidelines and safeguards designed to prevent future breakdowns.

“We are safer today than before the explosion. It reinforced the need for us to safely manage our chemicals, and we have taken immediate actions,” Piper said.

“We offer our apologies to those employees who were not cared for properly,” Yates added. “We want no more surprises. . . . We will fix the ways that we do business that led to these failures.”