Vol. 75/No. 9      March 7, 2011

Honeywell’s Metropolis works converts yellow cake uranium to uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a stage in the process of enriching uranium for nuclear power and weapons production. “Most of you don’t know about Gore, Oklahoma,” locked-out worker Howard Cook told the meeting’s participants. “That was a plant similar to ours that made UF6 just like we do.”

Cook said that in 1986, the Gore plant, owned by Kerr-McGee, “overfilled a UF6 cylinder, killed a man, and sent 80 to 100 people to the hospital.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) didn’t shut the plant down, Cook continued. “The NRC is the people we’re supposed to depend on for our safety. And you can see by Gore, Oklahoma, that they don’t give a damn.”

Others who spoke also pointed to the Gore plant as an example of what the union has fought to avoid here at the Metropolis facility. Many at the meeting echoed Cook’s distrust of the NRC, citing its inspectors’ cozy relationship with plant management and unreliable plant inspections.

Three months before the 1986 disaster, the NRC renewed the company's operating license, which had expired in October 1982. (The company had been operating for almost three years on a legal loophole that allows plants to continue production if they have applied for license renewal.)

On Jan. 4, 1986, 26-year-old James Harrison was stationed in a scrubbing tower at the plant right next to a cylinder that had been overfilled with 29,500 pounds of uranium hexafluoride—2,000 pounds over the limit. It was being heated to reduce the contents, an extremely hazardous practice that was apparently common procedure at the plant.

At about 11:30 a.m. the wall of the 12-foot-long, 14-ton cylinder split. Much of the UF6 escaped rapidly, making a dense white cloud. Pushed by the wind, the cloud quickly engulfed the process building and formed a plume expanding outside the plant.

Blinded and barely able to breathe, Harrison stumbled about as hydrofluoric acid began to eat away his lungs.

Kerr-McGee's emergency plans were virtually nonexistent. Coworkers managed to rescue Harrison but there was no oxygen on hand at the plant. They had to drive him eight miles to get a canister from a nursing home. They then drove another 11 miles to the Sequoyah Memorial Hospital, which was unable to adequately treat him. Finally they got him to the Regional Medical Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas, 21 miles away from the plant. It was too late.

Despite the obvious recklessness of plant management, the NRC allowed the Gore plant to continue operating. In late 1992, the agency ordered the closure of the entire facility when another “accident” resulted in contamination of the plant’s soil and groundwater.

Finally in August 2005 the NRC approved plans for decommissioning the facility. The estimated closure date is Dec. 1, 2012—close to 25 years since the fatal accident.

Like Kerr-McGee, Honeywell management is hostile to union involvement in enforcing safety. On February 7 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to inspect the Metropolis facility to follow up on a dangerous leak of hydrofluoric acid last December 22. The inspection team was to have included a representative of the Steelworkers union. But Honeywell rejected the Steelworkers participant, although the union has the legal right to be on such inspections.
 
 
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