In the face of questions from lawmakers, Department of Energy officials acknowledged yesterday that DOE has more work to do to ensure a strong safety culture across the complex. The Senate Financial and Contracting Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing to examine concerns over whether workers at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant are at risk of retaliation for raising safety concerns—an issue that gained visibility in 2010, when Walter Tamosaitis, a senior contractor executive at the WTP, alleged he was removed from the project for raising issues. In testimony at yesterday’s hearing, Bill Eckroade, Deputy Chief of Operations at DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security, said Tamosaitis’ allegations had helped to prompt an “awakening” as to the importance of safety culture. “We have learned a lot about safety culture and how to assess it, but the Department is growing its competencies in this area as we understand the results of safety culture reviews,” Eckroade said, adding, “So, you know, although the Department has not reached maturity in a healthy safety culture, we are clearly learning the importance of it and growing in our abilities to manage it. But we still have a lot of problems left to manage.”
Eckroade’s comments, though, prompted a sharp response from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “The Department’s been around how many years? … For decades, right? And it’s been overseeing these nuclear waste sites for how many years? … And so now you’re saying that the Office of Health, Safety and Security two years ago were just really kind of coming into understanding and dealing with safety and security issues?” Johnson asked Eckroade. “We didn’t stick our heads in the sand; we kind of ventured out to try to learn about this. And we’re learning and growing, but we are not mature,” Eckroade replied.
Johnson went on to state, “It is a little mind-boggling, a little jaw-dropping that within the Department of Energy, overseeing an incredibly complex—I’ll give you that —very difficult issue … [that] it’s really been in the last couple of years that we’re kind of pulling our head out of the sand and going, boy, you know, we really ought to take a look at safety and security concerns." He added that “in business, the idea of a safety culture is not new, not by any stretch of the imagination. You have to have specific controls so that your employees, the people who work with you, know exactly what they need to do to raise safety concerns so they can be addressed, you know, very quickly. That’s what has to happen.”