NRC PROPOSES $6,000 FINE FOR GLOBAL X - RAY AND TESTING CORP.
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In a letter to the company, Ellis W. Merschoff, Administrator of the NRC’s Region IV office in Arlington, Texas, said that as a result of an NRC inspection which ended in February, the agency determined that the company willfully violated certain NRC requirements associated with the handling of radioactive materials. During an inspection conducted in offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an NRC inspector found a radiography device, left “unsecured and uncontrolled in an unrestricted area” on a oil well platform. Radiography is a non-destructive testing method which uses a sealed radiation source to make x-ray like images of heavy metal objects like pumps, valves, and pipes. The company’s radiographer and his assistant were on another platform asleep.

“Our review found that the radiographer and his assistant were very tired from working their first night shift, just prior to the NRC inspector’s arrival,” Merschoff said. “Because of his fatigue and the difficulty in transporting the device to the platform with the darkroom, the radiographer (at about 4:30 a.m.) decided to leave the device on the platform where they had been working recognizing it was unsecured and uncontrolled. Accordingly, the NRC has concluded that the radiographer engaged in deliberate misconduct. Although he failed to secure or control the device, the source was locked in the shielded position and the radiographer took the key with him.”

The company has taken corrective actions by discussing the incident with other radiographers to stress the importance of securing industrial radiographic devices and of following radiation safety procedures, disciplining the radiographer, discussing with its clients the importance of having the darkroom on the same platform where work is being performed or of having a storage box available for securing the device, and increasing onsite surveillance of the safety practices of its radiographers.

The NRC has classified the one violation as a Severity Level III violation, which carries a $6,000 fine. The agency uses a four-level severity scale in which Severity Level I is the most serious. The company has 30 days from receipt of the letter to either pay the civil penalty or to challenge imposition of the fine.

The NRC’s letter, its enclosures, and the company’s response will be made available to interested members of the public through the agency’s public electronic reading room at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. Help in accessing these documents is available from the NRC Public Document Room at (301) 415-4737 or at 1-800-397-4209.

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Thursday, February 22, 2007