AIKEN, S.C. - Savannah River Site (SRS) employees working in the contaminated Plutonium Fuel Form (PuFF) Facility are applying lessons learned and using commercially available products to lower their risk of radiation exposure.
Workers with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the site’s management and operations contractor, now wear surgical gloves and sleeves while conducting EM cleanup work inside gloveboxes in the facility, which is housed within Building 235-F. The PuFF Facility has been inactive for more than 25 years.
The gloves are used in the medical industry to protect surgeons’ hands from radiation generated by x-ray machines or procedures involving nuclear medicine, while the lead sleeves protect their arms.
“Earlier in my career, I was working in another area on-site and we were faced with the potential for significant exposure to the worker’s extremities," 235-F Radiation Protection Manager Sean Barr said. “SRNS encourages us to have a questioning attitude and, with management support, I started doing research. I found that tungsten gloves and lead sleeves were commercially available products that might be able to help us reduce rates for our workers." Tungsten is a dense metal used in radiation shielding.
Barr said SRS recognized the need for the additional worker protections after EM’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) detailed how much plutonium (pu)-238 was left over in the PuFF Facility. SRNL had worked with the 235-F Risk Reduction Team to determine that an estimated 1,500 grams of pu-238 remain within the PuFF Facility's shielded cells.
Combining the gloves, sleeves, and lead aprons while working with pu-238 reduces the potential for external radiation exposure by 97 percent, according to SRS.
“Our employees are encouraged to find new and or improved ways of doing their work," SRNS EM Operations Senior Vice President Wyatt Clark said. “This is a perfect example of how SRNS employees are empowered to find better ways to do work safely and efficiently."
Crews are set to clean up the PuFF Facility’s nine cells by removing pu-238 and pu-238-contaminated equipment.
They've prepared the cells for this cleanup by removing fixed combustibles, upgrading the fire detection system, de-energizing unneeded electrical circuits, draining and cleaning shield windows after their partial disassembly, and installing light sources.
Any pu-238 and tools containing pu-238 will be safely stored for eventual packaging and shipment to EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for disposal.
Building 235-F contains a residual amount of pu-238, which was used as a heat source to power deep space missions. The building is a two-story, blast-resistant, windowless, reinforced concrete building. The PuFF Facility manufactured spheres and pellets out of pu-238 to provide electric power for deep space missions such as the Galileo space probe to Jupiter, launched from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in October 1989.
Because of the way the spheres and pellets were made, the pu-238 was left in some cells as a very fine particulate dust that is easily disturbed. Workers are currently removing materials from the PuFF Facility.
“We are committed to reducing risk by removing as much material from the facility as practical," Clark said. “But most importantly, we are committed to ensuring the safety of our workers in the process."
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
