Distinguished Merit Award: Implementation of a new safety standard for the management of Perchlorat

During decommissioning of facilities housing fume hoods contaminated with the presence of perchlorate salts, CNL recognized the need to improve the existing perchlorate testing procedure and to create an internal safety standard to address the risks associated during decommissioning and maintenance of fume hoods and associated exhaust systems contaminated with perchlorate salts. The initiative to develop and implement this new safety standard was led by the Industrial Hygiene (IH) Corporate Team.

For company-wide implementation, the IH Services group completed a large amount of documentation review including regulatory guidelines, research articles, industry practices and initiating discussions with internal and external stakeholder groups. An internal CNL working group was formed and included representatives from Facilities

Decommissioning, Maintenance, Radiation Protection, Waste Management, OSH, and Line SMEs. Hooman and Camille participated in many months of discussions and addressed operational and safety concerns raised during these working discussions. They presented on their proposed risk assessment decision criteria, dispositioned comments, and perchlorated contamination sampling strategy and analysis methodology, successfully establishing collaboration with the internal stakeholder to finally release the standard in September of 2023.The improvements in risk assessment, sampling strategy and analysis methodology established the framework to conduct decommissioning or maintenance work activities on perchlorate contaminated fume hoods or their exhaust systems with an approach focused on safety.

Hooman and Camille plan to continue their research and improvements on the sampling and analysis strategies with further laboratory experiments and plan to submit proposals to publish an article describing all findings in NIOSH’s Journal of Occupational Safety and Health. This is planned for completion in October 2024.