Bechtel National has settled litigation brought by a former worker at the Waste Treatment Plant the company is building at the U.S. Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
“The parties have arrived at a mutually satisfactory resolution of the case,” Bechtel spokeswoman Staci West said by email on Aug. 25. She declined to say if the employee would be rehired or release any further details of the settlement.
The lawsuit was filed in July 2018 by plaintiff Curtis W. Hall II, who said he was effectively wrongly terminated in 2017 by Bechtel for raising nuclear safety concerns about the Waste Treatment Plant. The plaintiff sought lost wages and other monetary damages.
Bechtel and Hall on June 27 filed papers with U.S. Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr., in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, saying settlement talks were underway. That was days before the scheduled trial date in the suit. The parties filed a formal notice with the court Aug. 14 asking that the litigation be dismissed. The judge formally terminated the case two days later.
This was the second retaliation lawsuit Hall filed against the contractor building the $17 billion Hanford plant designed to turn radioactive and chemical waste now stored in underground tanks into a safer glass-like form for disposal. The plaintiff lost his instrumentation engineering job at the site’s vitrification plant in 2005, and claimed it was retaliation for raising safety concerns. The Department of Energy Office of Hearings and Appeals Decisions ordered him reinstated to his post in late 2008.
Hall on several occasions in 2016 and 2017 raised questions about whether the WTP would run safely once completed, according to the Tri-City Herald in Washington state, which first reported the settlement on Aug. 24.
“Plaintiff repeatedly disclosed potentially dangerous vulnerabilities in the WTP emergency fire suppression systems, including risks of systems failure following seismic events,” according to Hall’s amended complaint filed in May of this year.
The plant is scheduled to start converting low-activity waste into a glass-like substance by 2023, with full operations by 2036.
Hall’s attorney, Stephani Ayers, did not respond to requests for comment regarding the settlement.
