The Department of Energy’s enforcement branch has proposed a $580,700 civil penalty against the cleanup contractor at the Idaho National Laboratory in connection with an April 2018 episode where four drums of radioactive sludge overheated and blew off their lids.
In a letter dated Nov. 20, Kevin Dressman who directs the enforcement office for DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, said the base civil penalty issued to Fluor Idaho, prior to consideration of various mitigating factors is more than $1.41 million.
But DOE credited Fluor Idaho for its “thorough and robust” response to the accident and the investigation of its causes. In addition, the federal agency said it has already deducted $500,000 total from the contractor’s fee in fiscal years 2019 and 2020 in connection with the event.
With those factors taken into account, the remaining civil penalty assessed against the Idaho cleanup contractor is $580,700. Fluor Idaho has 30 days to either pay or formally contest the preliminary notice of violation, according to the letter.
The explosion, as the former chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Bruce Hamilton has described it, involved four drums of repackaged waste originally from the long-shuttered Rocky Flats pit-manufacturing facility in Colorado that overheated and spewed radioactive sludge onto the walls and ceiling of a room within a fabric filter building at the lab.
No one was hurt in the accident in part because it occurred late at night while no workers were present in the fabric filter building, which DOE uses in waste repackaging operations, according to various DOE reports generated on the incident.
Fluor Idaho had moved the waste into new drums after checking for possible ignition sources. Hours after the transfer, the waste overheated. Temperatures inside the four containers increased to about 150 degrees Celsius after depleted uranium contacted air for the first time in years. Also, material from the drums generated methane, a flammable gas.
The new drums had not yet been certified for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Changes enacted after the accident include trying to better vet what exactly is inside the old drums and observing the waste longer for signs of sparking before it is repackaged into new drums.
A Fluor Idaho spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment late Monday.
