For the second time in less than two years, BNFL Inc. has surpassed one million work hours without a lost-time accident at its three building decontamination and decommissioning site at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Reaching the milestone is especially significant because of the inherent difficulties of cutting, lifting and removing the estimated 330 million pounds of metal and material from the three former gaseous diffusion plant buildings: K-33, K-31 and K-29. BNFL is under contract with the Department of Energy to decommission and decontaminate these three buildings that total 4.9 million square feet.

"For BNFL to reach this goal twice over the course of its work in Oak Ridge, is highly significant," said John A. Christian, vice president of D&D operations for BNFL, Inc. "Our team is made up of a group of skillfully-trained individuals who take their work and their commitment to safety very seriously."

BNFL encourages its workers to get involved in adapting positive safety behaviors at the site through its Behavioral Based Safety program.

"We need our employees to make suggestions because they're the ones who are out there doing the work on a day-to-day basis," said Christian. "They know what will and will not work. There's no safety manual or seminar that can provide us with the wealth of knowledge that our own employees bring to the table each day with their personal suggestions."

Congressman Zach Wamp applauds BNFL and its more than 900 employees for their concentrated effort to achieve such a milestone.

"Reaching this goal is obviously the result of a lot of hard work from everyone involved at this project site," said Wamp. "These men and women are actually playing a role in our nation's history each and every day they come to work because once the job is done, they can say they had a part in completing one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in the world. Now, that's something we should all be proud of."

DOE Oak Ridge Chief Operating Officer Robert Brown said, "this project is a massive undertaking like no other at the Department of Energy.  The credit should be given to each employee who makes a point of doing their job safely every day.  The record shows the employees of BNFL are doing that without exception."

Along with the announcement of BNFL's safety milestone, the company has accomplished three other achievements in recent months: the approval of the project's criticality safety program, the restart of converter disassembly and the approval of a new Basis for Interim Operation. With the completion of these achievements, Christian says BNFL sees a clear path toward completing its project by August 2004

"With these authorizations, we have a clear and unobstructed path toward completing this project safely and efficiently," said Christian. "We have no obstacles to proceeding with K-29 removal operations and working with the higher enrichment materials and processes in that facility."

During the week of Jan. 27, a 12-person DOE team conducted an assessment of our Nuclear Criticality Safety Program and determined that our program meets necessary requirements and supports conducting fissile material operations above five percent enrichment. The team had no findings, five observations and reported three noteworthy practices, including one practice, the funding and management commitment of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program, judged to be the best in the DOE complex.

On Feb. 4, BNFL was given the go-ahead to restart the disassembly of converters from K-31, the second building in our 3-building project. Converter disassembly had been under a self-imposed work stoppage due to a third tube bundle reaction in June 2002. The project team resumed converter disassembly after the successful completion of several full-scale disassembly demonstrations aimed at verifying readiness to resume full operations. DOE concurred with full-scale restart after it was demonstrated that all crews involved with converter disassembly had properly implemented all lesson learned from the previous events.

On Feb. 13, BNFL also received approval of its Authorization Basis for Interim Operations (AB). DOE is requiring contractors complex-wide to update ABs to meet the new federal safety standard. Having BNFL's AB updated and approved to the new standard, streamlines operations and gives BNFL full assurance of the safety of its project operations as it moves into areas of increased enrichment. The BNFL authorization basis is a first-of-its-kind document for the decommissioning of a large gaseous diffusion plant.