The Atkins-led contractor overseeing depleting uranium conversion at gaseous diffusion plants in Kentucky and Ohio needs a more focused and formal approach to “safety culture,” the Department of Energy’s auditing branch said in a recent assessment.
The DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments report was released this month for Mid-America Conversion Services, the joint venture of Atkins, Westinghouse and Fluor. The team runs the depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion facilities at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky.
In 2016, DOE and the Energy Facility Contractors Group defined safety culture as an “organization’s values and behaviors modeled by its leaders and internalized by its members,” which serve to protect workers, the public and the environment.
The DOE assessment of Mid-America, done remotely from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, said the DUF6 contractor has “not been consistent with safety culture survey standards and practices” that set the stage for “credible decision-making.”
For example, a safety panel at Paducah provided no documents to show questions in a culture survey for employees offered “validity or reliability,” according to the assessment.
Also, in-person meetings don’t provide employees with the chance to respond anonymously to surveys or questions. Communication “persists as a primary issue of dissatisfaction among employees,” the assessment office said. There was no strategic plan to address this, the report said.
The report also said DOE’s Lexington, Ky.-based Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, which manages the sites, lacks a “formally documented culture monitoring framework.” On the upside the DOE’s Lexington project office staff maintains a “good rapport” with the Mid-America Conversion team on safety.
The 14-page assessment credited the contractor for developing a policy “describing safety culture elements,” although “important weaknesses remain.”
Mid-America Conversion Services has used different approaches at Portsmouth and Paducah to keep track of organizational culture, according to the latest assessment. Portsmouth’s approach is based on a 10-question multiple-choice quarterly survey. “Paducah’s approach is based on a panel format asking 12 questions of a small group of employees quarterly, with interviews performed by a management and union team,” according to the report.
In the past year, employees at both sites and the corporate office in Lexington, received the same survey, developed for the contractor by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, according to the report. But the contractor’s worker response rate of 51% “is at the low end of what survey experts consider to be acceptable.”
The DOE office has done several reports over recent years on safety culture across the weapons complex, according to the document. DOE offers guidance on safety culture but expresses no specific requirements, according to the Office of Enterprise Assessments.