Waste Cleanup May Have Human Price

[UpInArms]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7073-2004Feb25.html

excerpt:

Department investigators, who descended on the clinic last week, are looking at allegations of fraud, supervisory misconduct and falsification of medical records at the clinic, which the Department of Energy has funded for 38 years.

Yet the scope of management practices that have endangered Hanford workers goes far beyond the clinic -- to the federal government itself and the private contractor it pays to clean up the tank farms, according to interviews with workers, union officials and outside experts in occupational health, as well as internal e-mails and memorandums and a continuing investigation by the Government Accountability Project.

These critics describe a Hanford culture -- dominated by profit-minded contractors and meekly supervised by federal bureaucrats -- where there are powerful financial incentives to cover up worker complaints, falsify reports of work-loss injuries and subordinate safety to production bonuses.

Contractors "have an incentive to minimize the number of workdays lost" to employee injuries, Alan Hopko, an Energy Department official who oversees contracting at Hanford, wrote in a 2002 e-mail. "On the other hand, if can do the work faster and cheaper because of fewer workdays lost, they can possibly earn additional fee."

<snip>

There are 177 waste tanks at Hanford, and more than a third of them have been leaking radioactive and cancer-causing toxins into groundwater for decades. The administration's goal is to keep these agents out of the Columbia River, while getting the federal government out of the cleanup business in Hanford as soon as possible. It wants to finish the job in three decades, rather than a previously projected seven. That could amount to a significant financial savings: The federal government now spends $2 billion a year at Hanford.

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