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Safety Problems Plague Hanford; 600 Workers Idledat Construction Site

Posted on: Monday, 26 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

RICHLAND (AP) -- About 600 workers were sent home early from a construction site at the Hanford nuclear reservation after a third safety problem in a week.

The incident was the latest in a string of problems associated with the waste treatment plant under construction at the south- central Washington site.

Construction was halted indefinitely this summer on a large portion of the project because of seismic problems, rising costs and delays.

The plant is being built to turn millions of gallons of radioactive waste into glass-like logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository. The waste, the remnants of Cold War-era plutonium production for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal, is stored in 177 underground tanks nearby.

In the Thursday incident that caused managers to shut down construction, a worker in an excavated hole cut a gas line without ensuring there was no propane in the line, said John Britton, a spokesman for Bechtel National, the contractor for the project.

The line held only residual propane. But had more propane been in the line, the worker could have been killed, Britton said. Propane, which is heavier than air, would have settled at the bottom of the hole, possibly asphyxiating the worker.

Earlier in the week, one worker was shocked when a metal pole was driven into the ground and touched a buried electrical line. Another worker failed to shut off one of three conveyor belts -- assuming it was already off -- while sampling gravel at the construction project's plant for making concrete.

No one was seriously injured in the incidents, but managers were concerned they had the potential to harm or kill workers.

"It's a disturbing trend," he told the Tri-City Herald for a story Friday. "You have to take these seriously."

The waste treatment plant has long been considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the highly contaminated Hanford site, which was created in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Once completed, it will stand 12 stories tall and be the size of four football fields.

Source: Columbian

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