A scientist who claims his questioning of key safety data related to underground disposal of transuranic waste in New Mexico cost him a permanent job with a Sandia National Laboratories contractor will have his case heard by a federal magistrate.
Plaintiff Charles Oakes agreed in an April 7 filing in U.S. District Court in New Mexico to have his case considered by U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephan Vidmar.
Oakes, “a preeminent expert in geochemistry and chemical thermodynamics,” claims in a suit filed January in state court that challenging data used for regulatory filings by the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) cost him a permanent job at National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia (NTESS): a Honeywell subsidiary that manages Sandia National Laboratories under contract to the DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Sandia acts as a science advisor to WIPP, the nation’s only deep disposal site for transuranic waste.
In June 2017, Sandia hired Oakes as a limited-term employee based in Carlsbad, N.M., to provide “expertise concerning chemical reactions and chemical thermodynamic models” for waste disposal at WIPP, according to his complaint.
While on the job, Oakes “discovered severely flawed science, rampant research misconduct, and false and fraudulent scientific work” by other Sandia scientists, according to the suit. After Oakes took his concerns to management, “his efforts to reform that culture were met with derision, hostility, and his pretextual termination,” in January 2019.
In the complaint, Oakes said between his hiring and firing his attempt to correct “deeply flawed” data gathered for submission to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was met with resistance by two Sandia contractor supervisors named in the suit, Carol Adkins and Paul Shoemaker.
Oakes claims “phantom allegations of disruptive behavior” were raised against him, and other colleagues who challenged data used to prepare WIPP’s recertification application with EPA.
Oakes was dismissed “following multiple inappropriate interactions with colleagues,” Honeywell said in a March 28 motion to dismiss the suit. The Honeywell brief does not describe the inappropriate actions, although Oakes’ brief said Sandia brought in a “security captain” to be on hand for the January 2019 firing.
Sandia is headquartered on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and so therefore is a federal property, or federal “enclave” not subject to key New Mexico law claims cited in the Oakes’ complaint, Honeywell said. Honeywell, incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in North Carolina, said it maintains an “arm’s length” relationship with its Sandia contracting subsidiary. Honeywell neither hired nor fired Oakes, it said in its filing.
While Oakes claims the supervisors named in the suit kept him from becoming a long-term employee “in retaliation for concerns he raised regarding problematic science,” the plaintiff offers little evidence to back up this claim, Honeywell said.
Honeywell also goes on to say that retaliatory firings are tough to prove under New Mexico law. The plaintiff must show his “firing was an intentional act done solely” to serve the interests of the supervisors, Honeywell said.
While Oakes tosses around the term “fraud” often in the complaint, he fails to make a case for it, Honeywell said.
“At a minimum,” Honeywell said the legal standard requires Oakes to lay out “the ‘who, what, when, where and how’ of the alleged fraud.”
