Attorney for ex-Columbia Generating Station pipefitter probing NRC for answers about May radiation release

By John Stang

The attorney for a pipefitter exposed to radiation recently questioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about why the worker was not interviewed in the aftermath of a May 2021 incident at the Columbia Generating Station north of Richland, Washington. 

Last week, Washington, D.C. labor attorney Billie Pirner Garde sent a letter seeking answers to Mary Muessle, director of the division radiological safety and security for NRC’s Region 4. The request was made on behalf of Tri-Cities area pipefitter Shannon Phillips, who was one of 22 workers exposed to radiation.

“Attorney Garde’s letter deals with the agency’s allegations process and an ongoing enforcement action, so the NRC will be responding directly to Attorney Garde in the next few days,” an NRC spokesman wrote in a May 6 email. 

In a Jan. 13 report, the NRC wrote that Energy Northwest workers did not follow written procedures and radiological rules during a May 28, 2021 pipe-welding project while the Columbia Generating Station’s reactor was shut down for routine maintenance. That resulted in radioactive particles becoming airborne during the welding work on a highly radioactive reactor-water cleanup heat exchanger. 

Personnel performed the work on a nearby platform attached to some scaffolding, according to NRC’s report.

A supervising plant technician charged with keeping constant watch on the workers did not call out the mistakes with the glove bag and vacuum, which should have been cause to stop the work, NRC wrote in its report. It was another radiation protection supervisor, near a remote monitoring station some 40 feet from the work area, who noticed what went wrong with the glove bag and stopped the work.

Of the 22 exposed workers, one received a committed effective dose equivalent of 961 millirems while another received 711 millirems, according to the NRC report. Sixteen received doses of 1 millirem or less, most while passing the contaminated area. The NRC set a maximum exposure limit of 5,000 millirems per year, while Energy Northwest works with a 2,000 millirems limit.

In a March 1 public virtual conference between Energy Northwest and the NRC, Phillips said no one for the NRC interviewed him before making a preliminary “white” recommendation about the incident, and that he disputed some of Energy Northwest’s information on the incident. During the conference,an NRC inspector said he would contact Phillips.

The NRC has not made a decision yet on how to classify the incident — a determination that will affect how much the owner of the Columbia Generating Station reactor is at fault for the work errors and subsequent radiation exposures. The NRC set no timeline for that decision. The NRC preliminary “white” is essentially a two out of four on the commission’s scale of successively more severe security and safety performance indicators.

In Thursday’s letter, Garde wrote  “For reasons completely unexplainable, this [public conference] was not recorded by the NRC. It is not clear whether the meeting was recorded by any representative of the Licensee.”

Garde continued: “Also unexplainable is why my client, a principal actor in the events at issue, nor [to the best of his knowledge] any of the other exposed workers who were present in the room at the time, interviewed in connection with the 6-month long inspection the NRC conducted. In reviewing the inspection report, it is obvious that the inspection consumed substantial agency resources in inspector time and money. However, it appears that none of the worker/victims on night shift were ever interviewed by the NRC.” 

No respirators were issued for the welding job and that Phillips and others who requested them were overruled, she wrote.

Phillips also was not interviewed by Energy Northwest in the aftermath of the incident, Garde wrote. In a phone conversation with the RadWaste Monitor,Phillips said the NRC interviewed him in depth in April.

Phillips contacted the NRC soon after the May 28, 2021 incident, with Garde writing that his concerns did not show up in the report discussed at the March 1 2022 conference. 

Garde wrote: “Following my client’s public statement at the March 1, 2022 meeting, he has been in touch with the NRC, but that contact has not yet addressed the technical inadequacies in the planning process, the procedural violations, the exposure event itself, or the lack of any meaningful follow up to the event with the exposed workers. These issues should have been included in the initial inspection, and probed during that extensive regulatory effort.”

Phillips said he was laid off nine days after the May 28 incident. He still works as a pipefitter and plumber in the Richland area. He said he suffered constant coughing, vomiting and vertigo for about two months after the May 2021 incident.