Thursday, October 21, 1999
DOE report criticizes uranium plant contractor
BY JAMES PRICHARD
The Associated Press
EVANSVILLE, Ind. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a report Wednesday on the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant that is critical of the company contracted to handle the plant's extensive cleanup operation.
The department also says the risk of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction at the uranium-processing plant, while small, cannot be ruled out.
The report summarizes a six-week DOE investigation and deals with environmental, safety and health issues at the western Kentucky plant dating to 1990.
It is the first half of a two-part review of the plant's operations. The second half, a more historical overview, will focus on how the plant was run from the time it opened in 1952 until 1989.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson opened the investigation in August after the Washington Post reported three former plant workers had filed a sealed whistle-blower lawsuit in federal court in June.
The suit alleges that years of indifference and mismanagement had exposed them and other unknowing workers to plutonium-contaminated dust and that discharges had fouled the ground water and soil beneath and around the 3,400-acre complex.
It also charges that contractors at the DOE-owned plant had lied to the govern ment about the extent of the site's radioactive contamination in order to collect financial incentives.
During a recent visit to Paducah, Ky., Mr. Richardson apologized to plant workers and the community for what he said were lapses in account ability and oversight. He vowed to ask Congress to pay plant workers or their surviving spouses who could claim radiation-induced illnesses.
In their report, Energy Department investigators found “continuing weaknesses in the radiation protection management of known environmental contamination areas” by both the contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Co. LLC, as well as DOE.
“There is a lack of rigor, formality, and discipline in the development, maintenance and implementation of the Bechtel Jacobs radiation protection program,” the report says.
Bechtel Jacobs also needs to make sure subcontractors “effectively implement all DOE and regulatory requirements and are held accountable.”
Mark Musolf, a spokesman for the Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based company, said he thought the report was “tough but fair.”
“It found some things that we need to fix, and it found some things that DOE needs to fix, and it found, I think, some things that Congress needs to fix,” Mr. Musolf said.
Bechtel Jacobs has agreed to begin an independent review of its radiological protection program for workers.
An Energy Department official said Bechtel Jacobs was not responsible for all of the plant's woes, many of which existed before it took over cleanup operations on April 1, 1998. The company has a five-year contract with the agency.
“There's plenty of blame to go around and the DOE certainly is not exempt from looking at itself and from considering that we had a role in allowing a lot of these problems to develop,” David Michaels, the DOE's assistant secretary for environment, safety and health, told reporters during a teleconference from Washington, D.C. “If fingers are going to be pointed, they should be pointed in many directions at once.”
Among investigators' concerns are that potentially fissionable radioactive material stored inside buildings at the complex has not been completely analyzed. The risk of a reaction, known as a criticality accident, cannot be ruled out as a result, the report says.
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