By Dan Klepal
Enquirer staff writer

CROSBY TWP. - The U.S. Department of Energy found that the contractor handling the most complicated and dangerous aspect of the decade-old Fernald nuclear cleanup was not ready to start performing the work and did a poor job in assessing its own readiness.

The government found so many safety deficiencies that the contractor, Fluor Fernald, has asked for a three-week delay in starting the transfer of radioactive sludge from silos into temporary holding tanks.

Fernald is a Cold-War relic where uranium was enriched for eventual use in nuclear weapons.

The transfer of the sludge is a necessary first step before the waste from so-called Silos 1 and 2 can be mixed with concrete and shipped elsewhere for permanent disposal. The waste inside Silos 1 and 2 is the most dangerous of the radioactive material at Fernald. Fernald is the site of a $4.4 billion cleanup of soil, groundwater, building debris and waste in three silos.

The Department of Energy is supervising the cleanup. In an Aug. 23 report, it found that the contractor "failed to identify and correct significant deficiencies prior to declaring readiness, indicative of either a lack of objectivity or thoroughness in completing the self assessments," before telling the government it was ready to begin the work.

Dennis Carr, Fluor's supervisor on the silos project, said the criticism was warranted but is not indicative of where the project is.

"If there would have been significant (problems), the assessment would have been stopped," Carr said. "So the fact that we made it though the assessment shows that DOE thinks we can safely operate the system."

The cleaning of Silo 3 has been on hold since July 25, tied up in a legal dispute with the state of Nevada, which has threatened to sue the government over its plan to dispose of Fernald waste near Las Vegas. The contractor has been on standby since that time, spending about $10,000 per day to remain ready. The tab for taxpayers thus far is $385,000. No material has been removed.

It remains unclear when or how the legal dispute will be resolved, or what will happen if the federal government can't ship any of the waste to Nevada, which claims the plan to dispose of the material there is illegal and unsafe.

E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com