Heading for nuclear disaster, fully warned
It always astonishes me when organizations, when a serious potential problem is pointed out, viciously attack the person pointing out the problem. This approach seems so wrong-headed to me—indistinguishable from stupidity. Here’s a prime example, reported in the LA Times by Ralph Vartabedian. His report begins:
Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation’s nuclear weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing to do for the last year.
Tamosaitis’ bosses sent him there when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy Department’s project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas explosions.
“Walt is killing us,” said Frank Russo, Bechtel Corp.’s top manager at the project, in an email to Tamosaitis’ boss urging that the engineer be brought under control.
Now, an independent government watchdog agency, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, has backed up Tamosaitis and issued a rebuke to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, concluding that the safety culture at the $12.3-billion project is “flawed” and that significant risks exist in the plant’s design.
The conclusion came after a nearly yearlong investigation, which took testimony from 45 witnesses and reviewed 30,000 documents. It confirmed that Tamosaitis had been “abruptly removed from the project” when he raised technical questions about its design, and that the actions against him had frightened other engineers. . .
Continue reading. Of course, when the disaster does occur, people like Frank Russo are either nowhere to be seen, or they appear in the news saying things like, “No one could have predicted this terrible tragedy.”
