By John Stang
Longtime Hanford Challenge executive director Tom Carpenter plans to semi-retire on April 1 — beginning a phaseout after roughly 35 years as one of the Hanford site’s leading public watchdogs.
Carpenter, 64, will step down as executive director of the organization that he founded, but will stay on as an advisor. Deputy Director Nikolas Peterson will take over the six-person Seattle-based nonprofit operation, while Carpenter works less hours and concentrates on projects.
“I’ll probably end up doing deep dives on issues we care about,” said Carpenter, who found more and more of his time involved in administrative matters.
A graduate of the now-closed Antioch School of Law, Carpenter joined the Washington, D.C.-based whistleblower advocacy organization Government Accountability Project (GAP) in 1985, where he ended up handling whistleblower cases across several Department of Energy sites. With whistleblower cases surging at Hanford, GAP had Carpenter open a Seattle office in 1992. “Hanford is the tail that wags the whole dog (on whistleblower matters),” he told the Monitor in an interview.
In 2007, he split from GAP to create Hanford Challenge to tackle other Hanford issues in addition to whistleblower matters.
Hanford has had an up-and-down attitude toward being open to the public, with DOE currently in a closemouthed mode. “It’s almost gone full circle,” Carpenter said.
When Carpenter began seeing Hanford whistleblowers at their homes in the 1980s and early 1990s, security agents would park outside the houses during his visits. One Hanford employee confessed to Carpenter that he was pressured by the site’s security people to spy on a whistleblower friend.
Changes came during President Bill Clinton’s administration with then-Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. “She loved whistleblowers. She wanted them embraced,” Carpenter said. The openness of the Clinton years was reversed during the George W. Bush administration, he said, adding that non-responsiveness to Hanford Challenge and other watchdog organizations has persisted since then.
Under current DOE Hanford Manager Brian Vance, “they don’t answer correspondence and they don’t answer phone calls,” Carpenter said. DOE’s Richland office did not respond by deadline to an inquiry by the Weapons Complex Monitor about this contention. Carpenter, at least as of December, was listed as one of the members of the DOE-chartered Hanford Advisory Board: the main public forum through which DOE and its contractors solicit opinions from the community around the site.
Carpenter has been involved with some of Hanford’s highest profile whistleblower cases.
These include early whistleblowers Casey Ruud and Ed Bricker in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who said they lost their jobs after reporting on nuclear safety and environmental law violations. In the latter half of the 1990s, these included several pipefitters who refused to install unsafe high-reassure water valves, reported the problem up their chain of command and were soon laid off.
In the 2010s, these included mid- and high-level managers Walt Tamosaitis, Donna Busche and Gary Brunson, who raised engineering and safety concerns about Hanford’s frequently delayed vitrification plant and ended up exiled to lesser jobs.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board agreed with those vitrification plant whistleblower concerns. In 2015, lead vitrification contractor Bechtel and DOE cited those concerns in 2015 as reasons for some project delays.
Carpenter helped found the Hanford Joint Council in 1994, which was later discontinued by Hanford’s management. It was revived for a time as the Hanford Concerns Council, which according to its website “ceased case and advisory operations” in 2016. The two versions claimed to have mediated and resolved over 120 employee-whistleblower cases from Hanford.
Peterson is from Walla Walla, and graduated from Seattle University’s School of Law in 2012, He immediately began working for Hanford Challenge and became the non-profit’s deputy director and legal director.
“I feel a great responsibility to everyone who calls the Pacific Northwest home to ensure a safe and effective cleanup of Hanford. I have learned so much from Tom, working side by side these past 10 years, and I’m fortunate to be able to rely on his guidance as I step into this new role,” Peterson said in a press release.
