The president of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) is resigning, but says he plans to remain involved at the Hanford Site, focusing on health and safety training.
Dave Molnaa will on April 16 leave the job he has held for 12 years at HAMTC, an umbrella group for 15 unions representing workers at the Department of Energy cleanup site near Richland, Wash. “It is time to step down and let the new kids take over,” he said. The HAMTC Executive Board is expected to name a new president on April 12.
Molnaa told the Department of Energy and its waste storage tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), in a letter this week that he’s seen substantial improvements in a crucial issue: protection of workers from chemical vapors emitted by storage tanks filled with radioactive waste. That is a turnaround from the letters he sent Hanford tank farm officials in mid-2016. In June, Molnaa issued a list of demands for better protection of tank farm workers, saying the time for requests, suggestions, and recommendations had passed and that a more aggressive approach and immediate actions were needed. He followed that with a stop-work order in July unless workers wore supplied air respirators any time they entered the fence line of a tank farm.
“Through collaboration and good faith interactions between WRPS and HAMTC, the demands and challenges extended to DOE in these letters have, thus far, either been met or accommodated through reasonable alternatives while taking into consideration site physical limitations or necessary operational flexibility,” Molnaa wrote in his latest letter. He outlined improvements either completed or in progress: field testing of new vapor monitoring and detection equipment; new reader boards warning of restricted road access during tank farm activities that increase the risk of a chemical vapors emission; evaluation of existing tank farm fence lines; better and more transparent work planning efforts; and plans or work to install exhausters and increase vent stack heights where needed.
Dozens of workers reported possible exposure to tank vapors last year. Over the long term, some Hanford workers say they have suffered significant harm to their health from exposure to vapors from the waste, a byproduct of decades of nuclear-weapon plutonium production at Hanford.
More work remains, Molnaa said in an interview. Supplied air respirators have been key to safeguarding workers from chemical vapors, he said, but they are a stopgap measure and DOE and WRPS must make engineering improvements to keep the chemical vapors out of the air that workers breathe. Molnaa is asking the agency and its contractor to continue to work with a team of national experts that HAMTC selected to review results of testing of air purifying respirators, which the labor group has agreed can be used in one tank farm on a limited basis in place of the heavy and cumbersome supplied air respirator systems.
Molnaa also played a key role in contentious contract negotiations at Hanford in 2013. Tank farm workers initially rejected the proposal that was approved by their union co-workers at CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., Mission Support Alliance, Washington Closure Hanford, and Advanced Technologies and Laboratories. It was the third proposal on the table. Molnaa then said tank farm workers had a choice of approving the agreement or authorizing a possible strike, and tank farm workers approved the deal on a second vote. Molnaa had warned that a strike likely would fail.
