The U.S. Department of Justice is opening a U.S. Attorney’s Office branch in Richland, Wash., near the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, Vanessa Waldref, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington said Oct. 14 in a press release.
Federal prosecutors have handled an average of about 70 cases per year from the Tri-Cities area, Waldref added. This includes prosecution since 2005 of DOE contractors led by such companies as Bechtel, CH2M — now part of Jacobs — and HPM Corp. The DOE-related cases include fraudulent COVID-19 claims, overbilling, time card fraud or submitting false claims worth millions of dollars to the federal government.
The Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy’s largest and most costly nuclear cleanup property, has been dubbed “Storm Ready” under a voluntary program with the National Weather Service, DOE said Tuesday.
Thanks to the storm-ready designation, the federal weather agency could use its meteorologists to support the emergency operations center at Hanford and DOE’s site services contractor, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, the DOE said in a press release. The Leidos-led contractor runs both the emergency ops center and the Hanford Meteorological Station. The “Storm Ready” designation was announced during a recent visit to the site by the National Weather Service’s Western Region Director Grant Cooper.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), this fall introduced the Beryllium Testing Fairness Act, a bill designed to make it easier for workers at the Hanford Site in Washington state and elsewhere in the weapons complex to qualify for diseases caused by beryllium exposure.
Beryllium is a toxic metal that for decades was used in nuclear fuel rods at the Hanford site and elsewhere, Murray, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in a recent press release. Murray, who has served in the Senate since January 1993, is engaged in a re-election campaign against Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley.
