At risk are the Columbia River, as well as the health and safety of people in southeast Washington State.
Dr. Walter Tamosaitis was the research and technology manager and the deputy chief processing engineer for URS Corporation, a subcontractor to Bechtel. Since 2003, Tamosaitis oversaw a $500 million budget covering some of the waste treatment plant’s most crucial design functions.
On July 2, Tamosaitis was escorted out of the building “like an absolute felon,” he said, and stripped of his position after raising a series of safety and operational concerns.
A lead engineer at the $12.3 billion Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation says the Department of Energy – along with lead contractor Bechtel National, Inc. – cannot assure the public that the plant will work properly and safely when it is completed about a decade from now despite public statements to the contrary and $5 billion spent so far.
At risk are the Columbia River, as well as the health and safety of people in southeast Washington State.
Dr. Walter Tamosaitis was the research and technology manager and the deputy chief processing engineer for URS Corporation, a subcontractor to Bechtel. Since 2003, Tamosaitis oversaw a $500 million budget covering some of the waste treatment plant’s most crucial design functions.
On July 2, Tamosaitis was escorted out of the building “like an absolute felon,” he said, and stripped of his position after raising a series of safety and operational concerns.
“The management, in my opinion, did not want to hear that and the easiest thing to do to move ahead is to eliminate what’s a potential road block. …’We’ll get rid of him,’” he said.
The day before he was dismissed, Tamosaitis and a team of fellow engineers presented about 50 unresolved technical issues in a meeting with URS and Bechtel managers. The list included some of the 100 yet-unresolved operational and safety issues he and others had identified the year before.
“There were some Bechtel managers in the meeting who tried to downplay the issues,” Tamosaitis said. “Others in the room said they do exist and would not let the issues be swept under the carpet.”
Today, Tamosaitis, who has a masters and PhD in systems engineering, works among the copy machines in the building’s basement where he performs menial tasks. He is a daily reminder to other engineers working at Hanford of what can happen to them if they question management.
Some at the plant now fear retaliation if they continue to raise concerns, he said. “I’ve heard people tell me that if they’ll do this to you, it scares me what they would do to me,” Tamosaitis said.
In response to the incident, DOE Office of Health, Safety, and Security interviewed workers at Bechtel and its subcontractors about its nuclear safety culture. Their conclusions came in a report released Oct. 6, the day before a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board hearing into design aspects of the plant.
“Most personnel who were interviewed said their managers encouraged a questioning attitude and that they were comfortable with raising safety concerns,” the report found.
“However, some individuals believe that there is a chilled environment that discourages reporting of safety concerns, and/or are concerned about retaliation.”
DOE, Bechtel and URS declined to comment for this story in part because the matter is under investigation. DOE’s Office of Inspector General also launched an investigation, and Tamosaitis has filed a lawsuit.
In a statement to the local paper, the Tri-City Herald, URS said Tamosaitis left the project because the company’s work to address certain technical issues had ended. Tamosaitis, on the other hand, said a URS manager told him that Frank Russo, Bechtel project manager, wanted him out.
Dangerous Material
A third of the underground tanks storing waste today have leaked, threatening to send a radioactive plume of groundwater toward the Columbia River, the most important waterway in the region for vital fish habitat, recreation and drinking water.
The goal of the waste treatment plant is to turn that hazardous waste into a stable glass form through vitrification by 2040.
The cost to build the plant has already ballooned from Bechtel’s original estimate of $5 billion in 2003 to $12.3 billion today with rumors of it going even higher. And the timeline for completion, originally at seven years, has now been extended to 20 years.
According to Tamosaitis, Bechtel is continuing construction and downplaying unresolved design issues that could jeopardize the whole project.
“There are many, many people that are concerned that if these issues aren’t thoroughly addressed, this plant won’t work or certainly won’t operate well,” he said.
Dan McDonald, tank waste disposal project manager for the Washington Department of Ecology, which oversees development of the waste treatment plant, said he has confidence the plant will work. He acknowledged, however, there are still some design aspects that need to be addressed.
“Much has been done in terms of design analysis and review of the mixing issues,” McDonald said. “We know very well the scope of these issues. With a $12.3 billion plant, this is huge. There are significant and complex issues with which we are dealing. For the last four years we’ve been quite aware of the issues that are forthcoming, the potential scope of these issues, the magnitude and the potential impacts it may have on the waste treatment plant working correctly.”
Pre-treatment tank mixing
A primary area of concern raised by Tamosaitis and others involves the pre-treatment mixing of the radioactive and hazardous waste before it is separated into high and low grade batches for processing into glass.
The material will get mixed within the tanks by jets of air. If the tanks don’t mix well, Tamosaitis said, you could have an uncontrolled nuclear reaction similar to an atomic bomb. Such an event, called a criticality, can occur if hydrogen gas collects in the tank or if too much solid material collects at the bottom.
“The probability of a criticality occurring is low, I’ll acknowledge that,” Tamosaitis said. “But that event, whether you could have it or not have it, how close you are to having one or not having one, is being debated. And I would offer in a $12 billion plant, the mixing should be made more robust, more vigorous, such that that item isn’t debated.”
The specifics of the mixing issues were aired Thursday, Oct. 7, in a hearing by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
After struggling with the design of the mixing zones for several years, Bechtel decided that the solid material did not need to suspend off the bottom to achieve adequate mixing, considered industry standard. Instead, Bechtel determined the material needed only to move along the bottom. That decision, according to engineers for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, hired by Bechtel to analyze the design, represented a “considerable reduction in mixing criteria.”
It wasn’t the only concern raised by internal review engineers. PNNL engineers also had concerns about the scaling factor used by Bechtel to determine whether a small-scale test in drums about four-feet in diameter truly represented what might happen in tanks roughly 10 times that size. Tomasaitis, too, shared that concern.
In mid-September, Bechtel determined that a large-scale test could be completed in 2012 before construction of that portion of the plant begins, Russo told the board.
“It’s not just pushing the problem down the road,” Russo said. “If you can manage to maintain the project schedule and budget, and address those concerns, that’s our obligation.”
The other major concern is the plant might not work properly or take longer to build, further threatening the Columbia River, wasting valuable financial resources and prolonging one of the nation’s biggest environmental cleanups.
Last year, the Department of Energy withheld $3.1 million in payments to Bechtel largely because it had failed to prove it resolved ongoing concerns over the mixing zones, which it was legally bound to complete by June of last year. On Sept 9, DOE closed out those 28 technical issues, two months after Tamosaitis was demoted.
History of Reprisal
Just like today, DOE surveyed workers in response. They interviewed 117 construction workers in 2005 and found more than half of those surveyed said they believed they could be placing their jobs in jeopardy simply by participating in the interview.
Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge – a non-profit watchdog group – said he’s been helping Hanford whistle-blowers since 1987, including Tamosaitis.
“It’s vital to Hanford’s environmental remediation mission that a safety culture is established and nurtured so employees can bring concerns forward without fear of reprisal,” Carpenter said. “A culture of suppressed concerns leaves us guessing whether there might be hidden defects. It does not inspire confidence that Bechtel has a history of suppressing employees that raise safety concerns.”
Walter’s letter to DOE
http://www.hanfordchallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/DNFSB-letter.pdf
A press release announcing Walter’s lawsuit
http://www.hanfordchallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/091010-Tamosaitis-Press-Release.pdf
