Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/20/2015
A senior Fluor executive late this week questioned the Department of Energy’s recent decision to issue a fine of almost a quarter-of-a-million dollars against Fluor-B&W Portsmouth, LLC, for a data falsification incident at the Portsmouth D&D project. Saying that some DOE enforcement decisions “don’t make a lot of sense to us,” Fluor Government Group Senior Vice President Greg Meyer noted that FBP self-reported the incident, which involved records associated with radiation detectors being falsified, to DOE and terminated 14 employees involved in the incident. “We immediately inform DOE, we go through an exhaustively disciplined review and investigated the fix and do an extent of condition and at the end of it we get fined about a quarter of a million dollars for bad management. What’s right about that?” Meyer said during an industry roundtable panel at the Seventh Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, held in Washington. “We discover a problem, we fix a problem and then we get fined for a problem. There are some enforcement things that don’t make a lot of sense to us.”
The April 2013 incident involved 32 instances where radiation protection documents had been found to have been falsified, according to DOE. The records appeared to have been changed to cover instances where the radiological monitors had been kept in service after failing a source check. FBP said at the time that there had been no evidence that contaminated items may have been improperly released from a radiological area as result of the use of detectors that did not pass source checks. In late January, DOE’s Office of Enforcement issued FBP a preliminary notice of violation outlining one Severity Level 1 violation, three Severity Level 2 violations and one Severity Level 3 violation. DOE originally proposed a penalty of $390,000 but chose to reduce the proposed fine to $243,750 in recognition for FBP identifying issues and taking corrective action. FBP has said it does not plan to contest the penalty.
‘It’s a Shared Risk’
The penalty issued to FBP brings up the question of balancing the risk between contractors and DOE, Meyer said. “We’re all okay with being held accountable. At the same time, reasonableness and the fairness is very important to us,” he said. “There are things at all of these DOE and [National Nuclear Security Administration] sites that quite frankly are beyond the contractor’s control. It’s a shared risk. That’s how we think that extra piece needs to be negotiated as we go downstream. I don’t think that any of us have a problem with being held accountable for our performance. At the same time there is a fine line between accountability and punishment.”
