BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CROSBY TOWNSHIP -- Two months ago, workers at the former Fernald processing plant improperly stacked 36 out of 11,000 barrels of warehoused enriched uranium -- and the paperwork has been flying ever since.
Fluor Daniel Fernald officials, who manage the overall cleanup project, will turn in a final incident report and corrective-action plan to the Department of Energy by the end of this month.
Workers will be retrained and the repackaging process refined. If the report is approved, Fluor Daniel workers will again be allowed to handle "restricted" enriched uranium -- low-level nuclear material that, in large quantities, has the potential to spark an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
Yet DOE scientists say they never believed such an accident would really happen.
"We take very seriously the controls that we have established on safety, even when there is no imminent danger. DOE does not take a back seat on this," said Randy Janke, nuclear materials disposition project manager.
Thousands of containers of valuable low-level enriched uranium are being shifted around the Fernald site, repackaged and shipped to commercial and government buyers.
The Energy Department holds 6.3 million pounds of the stuff in a single Fernald warehouse, which it hopes to sell off in the next two years.
The current activity, which began in December, is geared toward supplying 2.1 million pounds to British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.
That company will, in turn, sell the uranium to nuclear power plants in the United Kingdom. Any profit from the sale will go into the federal treasury.
Fluor Daniel has continued to make shipments during its incident investigation, Mr. Janke said.
But the barrel mistake was immediately sorted out, and officials have been studying their methods of handling uranium. John Sattler, DOE waste management project manager, said he expects some retraining and improvements will be made.
In the meantime, scientists have been testing the contents of the barrels, which were packed when Fernald production stopped in 1989. And they have found that many were over-classified -- the contents aren't as radioactive as the markings on the barrels indicate. So far, 93 barrels have been downgraded. Instead of being painted entirely red, they are now black with a single red stripe.
That means the material inside is not volatile enough to create a fission reaction, Mr. Janke explained.
He expects that once testing is complete, less than 500,000 pounds of uranium product left at Fernald will warrant "restricted" status.
And it will all be handled according to safety protocol.
"It sounds simple, but it's a lot of work. It takes a lot of people here with dedication and attention to the details to pull it off," Mr. Janke said.
"There are a lot of hoops to go through, and we have to be extremely careful at each step.
"Not only are our stakeholders (area residents and workers) watching us very closely, but we also have our own regulation to deal with."
