A federal court mediation deadline of Sept. 16 has been set for a long time worker at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina who sued operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions last year under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Attorneys for Richard Lusby, who initially filed his case in a South Carolina state court, and the Fluor-led management contractor, mutually agreed July 28 to delay the mediation deadline until mid-September because of time lost due to summer vacations.
Discovery has been conducted in the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for South Carolina and both sides have filed legal briefs, including motions for summary judgement. A jury trial could be held this year if the mediation fails to bear fruit, according to an Aug. 8 order filed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Paige Gossett.
Lusby claimed he ended up in a lower-paying job at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) After missing work to undergo successful cancer treatments. The plaintiff also claims SRNS turned him down for better jobs many times over years after he was effectively demoted.
The contractor says in its legal briefs there is no link between Lusby’s leave of absence for cancer treatment and SRNS decisions to hire others, which management believed best qualified, for positions Lusby had sought.
A five-acre concrete slab, one of the last remnants of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant complex, has been removed from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the agency said this week.
UCOR, the Amentum-Jacobs joint venture cleaning up the Oak Ridge Site, recently finished removing the slab and backfilling the site where developers hope to construct a local airfield within the DOE Office of Environmental Management property now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park, according to a Tuesday press release.
UCOR used thousands of trucks to bring in 65,000 acres of backfill soil, with nearly half of the soil coming from elsewhere on the Oak Ridge Site, the contractor said in the release.
Last year, UCOR finished taking down the structures at the former gaseous diffusion complex property and is moving its cleanup crews to projects at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex. UCOR has a contract, currently valued at $3.9 billion, which started in August 2011 and is now scheduled to run through January 2022.
