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Pantex to Reform Procedures, Training
Pantex Plant is set to increase standards for worker training, procedures and reviews, following an incident in which workers may have mishandled a cracked explosive charge in a nuclear warhead, the Amarillo Globe News reported today (see GSN, Jan. 22). After contractor BWXT Pantex completed a corrective action plan, plant officials approved it and presented it to top National Nuclear Security Administration officials and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, said Steve Erhart, senior scientific and technical adviser for the Pantex Site Office. Erhart also said a self-assessment at the Texas nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility concluded that workers responded properly in the incident, in which technicians taped and moved a damaged explosive charge while dismantling a nuclear warhead, but that procedures could be improved. “We concluded that local oversight of the nuclear explosive charge control process and weapons-specific training for facility representatives, although satisfactory, could be enhanced,” he said in a statement. Officials at the plant said Friday that the Jan. 8 incident did not cause a safety hazard. “Our investigation determined that there was never, at any time, a safety issue related to this incident,” said a statement by Jud Simmons, a BWXT Pantex spokesman. “The technicians were working in a safe and professional manner. They performed the process as they were trained, and they stopped work when appropriate,” he added. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Chairman John Conway said a nuclear safety expert should have been called in sooner to supervise workers, who could then have concluded the procedure more quickly. “I think they should have stopped it sooner. … They called for assistance — that’s the key thing — and the laboratory had a so-called expert there, who did not come down to eyeball it, but rendered an opinion that all they had to do was tape it up,” Conway said. “Then it was taped, but not the way the safety expert would have done it presumably, as I have been told,” he added. Pantex is expected to resume dismantlement operations once the review is complete and additional safety standards are put in place (Jim McBride, Amarillo Globe News, March 29).
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