By Martin Zizzi The world’s largest environmental cleanup project is underway in Hanford, Wash., at the site of a former nuclear weapons production facility. The project is so big because Hanford is the most contaminated site in the United States, the legacy of more than 40 years of producing plutonium. After plutonium production stopped in the late 1980s, state and federal government agencies began to focus on the site’s immense environmental challenges.

In the early 1990s, the state of Washington, the US Department of Energy, and the US Environmental Protection Agency joined in a long-term agreement to clean up the 560-square mile site. That’s a dangerous job for the project’s 11,000 workers, and protecting their health is CSC’s job.

Intensive environmental cleanup

According to the DOE’s Hanford Web site (www.hanford.gov), the Hanford site has “enormous quantities of spent nuclear fuel, leftover plutonium in various forms, buried waste, contaminated soil and groundwater, and contaminated buildings that must be cleaned up and torn down. Forty percent of the approximately one billion curies of human-made radioactivity that exist across the nuclear weapons complex resides here.”

The cleanup includes the Columbia River corridor, where eight plutonium production nuclear reactors tapped immense quantities of cold water to cool the reactors. In addition to the reactor plants, the site includes the plutonium extraction facilities, 177 underground tanks (called tank farms) containing more than 50 million gallons of highly radioactive transuranic plutonium production waste, and the uranium fuel rod manufacturing site along the river.

A new waste treatment plant — arguably the largest current civil works construction project in the country — is under construction to treat and process the waste currently stored in the tank farms.

Throughout the area, contractors perform decommission and demolition on site facilities and structures; remediate threats to the ground water and ultimately the Columbia River; recycle original waste burial sites; assess contamination; stabilize, reprocess, store, or rebury wastes in more technically modern fills; or prepare the waste for transportation to other storage sites.

Workplace safety and berylliosis

CSC has 83 CSC employees and 53 subcontractors onsite to provide occupational health services to the workers who perform these tasks. Although Hanford is an especially toxic site, these services are much the same as in other industrial settings.

Fundamentally, the purpose is to prevent injuries and illness to workers. Prevention is the key, but provision of hands-on medical services, such as the treatment of injuries, is an integral part of occupational medicine. Prevention entails monitoring of the workplace and workers so that preventive measures, such as proper personal protective equipment, can be put in place.

Occupational health programs have to be customized to meet specific site challenges. At Hanford, these challenges include emergency and disaster preparedness, legacy epidemiological studies, extensive records and case management, and the chronic beryllium disease program. Beryllium is a metal that in most uses presents little health risk. Certain uses, however, produce beryllium dust, which can cause a chronic respiratory disorder if inhaled. DOE enacted the chronic beryllium disease program to prevent exposure by ensuring the metal is properly handled.

Nonetheless, with a couple of exceptions — such as the tank farms and other areas where by-products of plutonium production are stored — precautions for CSC employees are not unlike those of other large industrial operations. Nuclear materials that remain onsite, for example, are in a highly secure location that occupational health services staff would not normally visit for workplace surveillance requirements. And while there are other areas, such as the tank farms, that hold potential risk for anyone working in them, visits to these sites by CSC employees are highly regulated.

The most common potential exposure scenario is associated with the worksite visit program where CSC’s occupational medicine physicians and physician assistants visit and evaluate the worksite so proper surveillance measures are developed and put in place for site workers. CSC staff receive special training associated with the specific sites being visited.

CSC began contract operations at the DOE Hanford site in June 2004, replacing a contractor with 38 yearsÕ incumbency. The contract, which is in effect until September 30, 2013, required accreditation within 24 months of contract startup, and CSC accomplished the requirement seven months ahead of schedule.

In December 2005, the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care awarded CSC's occupational health services contract a full three-year accreditation Ñ the longest accreditation period that can be awarded. The CSC team is playing a significant role in the worldÕs largest environmental cleanup project.

Martin Zizzi is CSC’s principal manager for Hanford Occupational Health Services.