Hanford injury reports doubted

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Hanford injury reports doubted
Audit finds nuclear-cleanup projects understated numbers for three years

By LISA STIFFLER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Contractors have underreported the number of injuries and illnesses at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and other nuclear-cleanup projects, creating a false image of safety and possibly masking threats to workers, according to a federal audit.

The inaccuracies, which had gone undetected by the federal department responsible for overseeing the Hanford cleanup, also helped boost payments to contractors by millions of dollars, critics charged yesterday.

The revelations have Washington's senators, watchdog groups and the Department of Energy's Inspector General's Office, which performed the audit, calling for improvements at Hanford and elsewhere.

"The Department of Energy cannot credibly claim that worker safety at nuclear-waste cleanup sites is a top priority if it can't accurately track work-related injuries and illnesses," said Sen. Maria Cantwell. "I hope and expect the DOE will take the results of this audit to heart."

More at this

... I have no doubt that such corruption is widespread and systemic.

quarterly. Are you getting them too?

hmmmmm interesting

I was employed as a Senior Research Scientist by Battelle who was the contractor for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory located at the southeast end of the Hanford site. Westinghouse, GE, Bechtel, SAIC, and dozens of other companies had/have contracts at the Hanford site. Actual DOE employees are relatively rare. Health Services itself was contracted.

Do they really (or still) have huge leaky barrels of toxic stuff from the 1950's that they have no idea what is in them now?

Yikes!

Each with many thousands of gallons of radioactive waste with chemical processes virtually unknown to science. They've been leaking into the ground and groundwater for many years. It's also a place where submarine reactors come to die and be resurrected.

he told me that Hanford was the 'biggest mess' he'd ever seen!

Hundreds of square miles ... the "heritage" of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Hanford is most infamous for PUREX ... the plutonium processing and weaponization. It was started in 1943 as a part of the Manhatten Project and was the source of the Nagasaki bomb. (Los Alamos produced the Hiroshima bomb.)

Remember they all panicked when the tank "burped"? There was the panic that the burp could be a flammable radioactive gas that could explode. They went to the giant paint-mixer rig to keep it stirred.

I used PNNL to conduct the lab analysis of the hex-chrome leaching from groundwater into the salmon spawning beds off of D/DR and H reactors.

eom