Fluor Unit Fined Over Nuclear Safety Issues

The U.S. Department of Energy has fined a Fluor Corp. subsidiary $140,625 for repeated safety violations by two of its subcontractors last year during cleanup of a former nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, Wash.

It is the largest levy against a civilian contractor since the department began enforcing nuclear facility safety rules in 1996, but it wasn’t enough for critics, who called it a slap on the wrist.

The fine was disclosed in a March 26 letter to Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc. from the Energy Department’s top safety and health official. The company has 30 days to protest, but it is not likely to do so.

“We have never denied the seriousness of the situation,” Fluor spokesman Mike Berriocha said. “We have spent the last 15 months getting our house in order, and now most of the corrective actions are in place.”

Fluor won the $4.8-billion contract to oversee cleanup of the Hanford plutonium processing facility last year and, Berriocha said, quickly discovered that emergency procedures and policies for handling the radioactive material were decades old, “cumbersome and often conflicting.”

The Hanford cleanup had been underway for several years before Fluor Daniel took over from Westinghouse Corp. as general contractor. Some environmental and safety groups have long been critical of the effort, but it took an explosion in a critical plutonium processing plant in May 1997 to trigger the federal probe.

The explosion caused significant damage, and a small amount of radioactivity was released inside the facility. To date, there have been no indications that any workers were injured by exposure to the radioactive material. Several workers, however, were exposed to harmful chemicals.

Fluor also is managing contractor in the $2.4-billion cleanup of a nuclear material processing plant in southern Ohio. A year ago, a federal audit lambasted the company for sloppy and wasteful management practices. The audit found, though, that Fluor was not responsible for any safety violations in the five years it had run the Ohio cleanup.

In the Hanford case, the Energy Department probe found that two subcontractors on the project had been guilty of “multiple and repeated” violations of safety regulations, including rules governing the safe movement and storage of plutonium.

The Energy Department noted that the Fluor unit was responsible for ensuring compliance with safety rules in its role as managing contractor.

Critics of the Hanford cleanup said the fine was inadequate.

“This pitifully little fine against Hanford contractors cannot be allowed to end the necessary investigations and legal actions,” said Gerald Pollet of Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford watchdog group.

The fine is just a fraction of the $54-million profit set aside in the cleanup contract for Fluor and its subcontractors for their work in 1997, Pollet said. He called the Energy Department’s action “a light slap on the wrist.”

But Mary Jo Zaccaro, an agency spokeswoman, said the fine is “just a small part of our response.”

The department also has issued a variety of orders aimed at improving enforcement of safety policies, speeding emergency response actions and correcting problems with the storage of radioactive materials, she said.

Additionally, state officials in Washington are conducting their own investigation of events that caused the May explosion.