The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board plans to a hold a hearing next spring on the safety culture at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant. The hearing is intended to examine what improvements have been made since the Board issued a recommendation this summer warning of an environment at the WTP where workers feel afraid to raise safety concerns, according to DNFSB Chairman Peter Winokur. Since the Board issued its recommendation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Health, Safety and Security has begun a new investigation into the safety culture at the project, along with a separate expert team commissioned by WTP project contractor Bechtel National. “Both the initial and follow-on HSS investigations should have a series of corrective actions. We’ll probably want to track those and see how they are doing. We always want to give members of the public and the federal and contractor workforce the opportunity to speak with the Board. We’ll obviously have questions and probably request the team that Bechtel has assembled to testify to the Board in terms of what they found,” Winokur told WC Monitor yesterday. “It’s really a good follow-up activity for the Board to make sure we can focus on whatever ground we’ve gained and whatever improvements have been made. I hope that we have a lot of good news on improvements in safety culture at WTP and progress on the extent-of-condition reviews during that hearing.”