The Energy Department may assess civil penalties against contractors that retaliate against whistleblowers within their ranks, under a new agency rule that goes into effect Jan. 26.
The agency released a summary of the final rule late last year in the Federal Register.
Senate Democrats from Washington state and Oregon, major stakeholders in the cleanup of the Hanford Site on the Columbia River that divides those two states, have criticized DOE for allowing its contractors to muffle employee concerns about nuclear safety.
The impending rule, set to kick in the week after Donald Trump is sworn in as president of the United States, clarifies that DOE’s “prohibition against whistleblower retaliation is a DOE Nuclear Safety Requirement to the extent that it concerns nuclear safety.”
Over the summer, Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill aimed at simplifying what they said are convoluted, overly bureaucratic whistleblower protocols at DOE. The bill — which will be rendered null and void in the new Congress set to gavel in Jan. 3 — would also have created new whistleblower protections and new consequences for contractors who subvert them.
In 2012, DOE halted construction on significant portions of the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) Bechtel National is building to treat liquid waste at the Hanford Site after an employee at a WTP subcontractor blew the whistle over safety concerns — a move the employee, engineer Walter Tamosaitis, said cost him his job.
In a paperwork move that officially marks the end of an era, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has removed uranium enrichment from the list of activities permitted under Centrus Energy Corp.’s license for the American Centrifuge project in Piketon, Ohio.
The order came down just before Christmas in a Dec. 23 letter to Stephen Toelle, Centrus’ director of regulatory affairs, from Craig Erlanger, director of the NRC’s Division of Fuel Cycle Safety, Safeguards, and environment review. The NRC posted the letter online Dec. 30.
Centrus petitioned the regulator to remove uranium enrichment from the license last summer after the company formerly known as U.S. Enrichment Corp. either removed all the gaseous uranium hexafluoride from the plant’s lead cascade centrifuges in Piketon, or removed hardware needed for enrichment from the premises entirely, according to the letter.
The NRC, which inspected the Piketon site in November, subsequently found “that conducting any enrichment of UF6 [uranium hexafluoride] is not physically possible” at the Piketon facility, Erlanger wrote.
Centrus thinks it will take until the end of 2018 and cost $40 million to $50 million to decommission the Piketon portion of the American Centrifuge project. That is on top of $15 million in decommissioning expenses the company racked up in the first nine months of 2016, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
DOE pulled funding for the American Centrifuge enrichment technology demonstration in 2015, though work continues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Radioactive waste produced by the project might be sent to DOE’s Nevada National Security Site for disposal, according to Centrus’ filings with the NRC.
It will take somewhere between nine months and a year longer than hoped to get 27 new sensors for the Hanford Site’s double-shell waste storage tanks in working order, the Energy Department disclosed.
DOE was supposed to have the sensors inside the annulus of Hanford’s 28 double-shell tanks working by December 2016, per a recommendation from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
However, the agency’s decision to focus on draining waste from one leaky double-shell tank, AY-102, “has delayed progress” on the sensors, Monica Regalbuto, DOE assistant secretary for environmental management, wrote in a Dec. 27 letter to DNFSB Chairman Joyce Connery.
The sensors are intended to checking for levels of waste that could generate dangerous levels of flammable gas in each double-shell tank’s annulus — the space between a tank’s inner and outer hulls. When DNFSB in 2012 recommended DOE install the sensors, the agency thought those systems would be up and running in December 2016. Now, the work will not be finished until “the fourth quarter of calendar year 2017,” Regalbuto wrote. Hanford tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) has installed sensors on the 27 tanks besides the leaky AY-102, but the company is still testing the new hardware, Regalbuto wrote.
After worker reports on the tank farm, WRPS acknowledged AY-102 was leaking in 2012. The tank, which was supposed to feed liquid waste into the Waste Treatment Plant under construction at Hanford, will not be fitted with a sensor; once the tank is empty, there will be no possibility of enough waste leaking into the annulus to build up flammable gas, DOE said.
Meanwhile, Hanford’s double-shell tanks already are outfitted with other sensors, Regalbuto wrote. The existing devices “meet environmental requirements” and also allow WRPS to monitor tank ventilation so that “sufficient ventilation will continue to be provided,” she stated.
Longenecker & Associates, the Las Vegas-based consulting shop focused on the Energy Department, has promoted Martin Schneider to senior vice president, expanding his business development responsibilities beyond the agency’s legacy nuclear cleanup mission.
Schneider joined Longenecker in 2015 and was most recently the company’s group vice president for environmental management programs. Schneider will remain involved with the firm’s EM portfolio, according to a Thursday press release announcing his promotion.
Schneider is the former chief executive officer of ExchangeMonitor Publications & Forums. At Longenecker, he occasionally contributes to external communications for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management.
