After the Energy Department’s inspector general prodded the company for failing to communicate openly with its workforce, the president of Washington River Protection Solutions on Wednesday threw open his door to employees working on the waste tank farm at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
“If you have any concerns, I invite you to share them with me or your manager,” Mark Lindholm, president and project manager for AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), wrote in an open letter posted to the company’s website Wednesday. “Our workplace is, and always will be, a place where each of us can identify issues and discuss them without fear of retaliation.”
That same day, acting DOE Inspector General Rickey Haas reported that some tank farm workers do fear retaliation for speaking up about the mounting number of potential worker exposures to the noxious vapors that sometimes leak from Hanford’s waste tanks.
To produce the 16-page special report, which was dated Nov. 10 but published online this week, the DOE IG interviewed 52 workers at the Hanford tank farm. According to the IG, seven of these people “had concerns with reporting, communicating, reprisal, or fear of retaliation related to potential vapor exposures.”
While those who spoke with the IG generally did not worry about reprisal, some workers related various levels of discomfort with WRPS management for its handling of complaints about the vapors.
One worker filed a formal complaint in June “to address concerns regarding retaliation,” while another “‘sort of’ perceived a form of reprisal because management openly discussed the worker’s exposure with coworkers, which the worker believed may have caused others to fear reporting vapor issues,” the IG wrote in its report.
While acknowledging steps taken by WRPS management and the Department of Energy to communicate with tank farm personnel regarding the vapors — including outreach campaigns and developing informational websites — the IG said that “in our discussions with workers, we concluded that management could take more steps to improve communication.”
To that end, the IG made three major recommendations for WRPS:
- Take action to input all vapor issues into the WRPS Problem Evaluation Request system [a contractor internal database], to ensure adequate tracking, closure, and visibility of corrective actions.
- Take steps to improve communication with the workforce about prior proposals to address vapor hazards that have been studied and not acted upon, to explain the rationale for these decisions.
- Continue to reinforce the DOE Office of Environmental Management safety culture principles.
Earlier this week, not long before the IG published its report, a federal judge ruled WRPS workers at the tank farm do not immediately need extra protection from the vapors. Washington state and two co-plaintiffs in a worker protection lawsuit against DOE had requested additional safety measures ahead of a September 2017 trial.
All of DOE Environmental Management, but particularly the Hanford Site, is under the congressional microscope when it comes to whistleblower retaliation. A group of Democratic senators this summer unveiled legislation to toughen penalties for whistleblower retaliation by DOE cleanup contractors.
Of these, perhaps the most vocal has been Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose state is separated from Washington by the Columbia River, along which Hanford’s reactors sat for years. Wyden handily won his re-election bid last week.
Hanford’s tank farms contain some 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste created by Cold War-era plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. The waste eventually will be mixed into glass to form a more easily storable solid via the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building at the site. Low-level liquid waste treatment is on schedule to begin by 2022, DOE has said. Treatment of sludgier, high-level liquid waste must begin by 2036, a federal judge ruled in March.
