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How A Retaliatory DOE Work Culture

Negates a Viable Safety Culture.
By Norman Ball

[Vienna, VAMarch 23, 2014] Since the onset

of the Manhattan Project over seventy years ago,
and through wars both hot and cold, the nations
nuclear plant workers have laid their healthand
often their livesdown for the greater good of our
nation. In recognition of these silent warriors and
their sacrifice, the Department of Energy has, at
least in writing, consistently expressed a
commitment to their safety, health and well-being.
At the same time, all parties have generally
acknowledged that chronic and profound
deficiencies continue to plague nuclear worker safety.
Citizens are right to ask at this timeparticularly in light of the recent spate of whistleblower
allegations and the personnel contamination events (PCEs) involving radioactive materials
at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico just last monthwhether
the reality has edged any closer to the rhetoric over the ensuing decades. Alas, the evidence
suggests not.
To be historically fair and accurate, the entire nuclear age cannot be laid directly at DOEs
door, as the latter has existed only since the mid-1970s and the Office of Environmental
Management (EM) since 1989. Nonetheless, this represents more than four decades of
institutional knowledge, not to mention all that was retained and inherited from pre-DOE
nuclear activities. The nuclear component of DOE hardly offers a Maytag repairman
environment. Safety threats are both frequent and very real. In 2004, there were over
100,000 claims for contamination illnesses, and recently a DOE report cataloged 525
Personal Contamination Events over a five year period, or an average of nine per month.
Just this past month, the fire and plutonium release at DOE's WIPP facility caused 17 PCEs.
Thus, there exists an extensive accident catalog from which to develop safety strategies and
practices.
Studies on safety matters, properly conducted, can advance the cause of real safety. The
trouble comes when studying substitutes for action. One recent effort, Internal Oversight
Evaluation of Line Self-Assessments of Safety Conscious Work Environment (February
2014) warrants some attention. Rich in subjective terminology (safety conscious work
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environment and safety culture, etc.) it is not readily reducible to actionable metrics,
benchmarks or, frankly, to accountability. Duffy & Associates James Fannon questions
further the methodological veracity of an in-house, self-assessment format:

The independence is certain though suspect as it specifically involves offices within DOE
HQ (EM, HSS, and PM). As for the self-assessment, that is performed by DOEs three
major contractors (URS, CH2M Hill and B&W) at Idaho, Oak Ridge, WIPP, and SRS. Each
contractor handles its own self-assessing data collection. None of the DOE site
management teams offered input to these self-assessments.
Suppose we had responsibility for writing our own tickets whenever we ran a red light. How
many times would we pull ourselves over? Even more important, would we perhaps become
more reckless knowing that the police siren was ours to control? Traffic fatalities would
almost certainly rise under a self-assessment regime.
Anyone whos spent any time in Washington knows studies can either precipitate real calls
to action or they can mimic bureaucratic sleepwalks. Sadly, the latter happens more often
than not. Observers are wise to question a study conducted by way of prior obligation as
opposed to one enthusiastically championed by senior management; compelled obligation
can render the entire exercise obligatory. (In the case of this study, meet[ing] a commitment
in the DOE implementation plan for Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
Recommendations 2011-1 seems to imply prior obligation, and thus obligatoriness.)
There are additional clues suggesting a (low) level of senior management commitment:

DOE line management (i.e., DOE program offices) did not clearly communicate to site
organizations their expectations for performing the self-assessments in a timely manner.
In some cases[the] guidance document was not provided to the sites until months after
it was issued. Interviews with senior DOE and contractor management at individual sites
indicated that most sites received either confusing communications or no communications
at all
Organizational dissonance has long afflicted the relationship between DOE nuclear field
facilities and DOE Headquarters. While the former struggles to strike a vital balance between
safety and on-the-job effectiveness, the latter offers eloquent though essentially ornamental
pronouncements, leading observers to question whether worker safety might be nothing
more than simply another talking point or policy objective.
Of course, no work environment is completely immune to periodic lapses in vigilance.
Antiquated safety protocols must occasionally be updated and standard practices
procedurally revised. Thus, even at the best of times, safety is an ongoing process, never

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a discrete destination. The issue quickly becomes one of degree and prevailing culture.
Just how committed are senior Department officials to ensuring safety in the field?
DOE Headquarters inattention to the administrative details of the study, chronicled above,
hardly speaks to unequivocal buy-in at the top. By contrast, the study report notes the
enthusiasm many in the field showed towards making it a success. The varying receptions
between field and headquarters may have everything to do with location. The former live
and work where the waste lives. Whereas the latter do not. Here, we may be grappling with
a sad reality of human nature: The further one is from the point of danger, the more
abstractand less urgentthat danger becomes.
The DOE complex boasts some formidable expertsboth on-staff and within contractor
rankswhose experience and knowledge are more than up to accomplishing the
Departments stated safety mission, even in the high-risk realm of nuclear waste disposal.
However, they must be allowed to go wherever their professional druthers take them
(especially on safety matters), even if that puts them at odds with prevailing department
practices.
One would think that after seven decades of federal involvement in an area as dangerous
as nuclear waste handling, whistleblower checks and balances would be well-established.
And yet, former URS employee and Senior Scientist Walter Tamosaitis suggests retaliation
and reprisal is still alive and well. On October 2, 2013, DOE contractor URS fired Tamosaitis
in what they termed a corporate downsizing. In 2011, he had raised serious design questions
about the $12.3-billion industrial waste treatment plant in Hanford, Washington. He would
spend the next three years relieved of his 100-engineer staff and relegated to a basement
office with neither furniture nor phone.
Within days of Tamosaitis termination, and to their credit, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and
Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz challenging the
retaliatory nature of the scientists dismissal while pointing out its wider implications for,
perpetuating a culture that would plunge DOE employees and contractors who dare to raise
safety issues into the deep freeze or worse.from The Los Angeles Times, October 9,
2013, Senators Urge Protection of Hanford Whistleblower Tamosaitis, by Ralph
Vartabedian
We believe the Senators are on-target with their deep freeze or worse analogy. A culture
of safety cannot flourish in a climate of fear. Poor safety standards and a retaliatory work
environment are two sides of the same coin. Thus, a crucial antecedent to real and
actionable safety must be vigorous protection of industry whistleblowers and safety
watchdogs. On-the-ground personnel furnish a critical feedback loop that senior
management ignoreor muzzleat everyones peril.
Though somewhat tangential, Uncle Sam also finds himself in a peculiar legal quandary. It
turns out the federal government reimburses contractor companies for any legal costs
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incurred in wrongful termination suits filed by terminated employees. In effect, the

government pays to ensure whistleblowers and safety advocates are further ground down
in protracted legal challenges, regardless of merit. Public sector-funded retaliation
imposes a further tax on the People while placing, at the same time, a viable safety
culture even further beyond reach.
This sad tale gets sadder still. At a time when department officials lament the departure and
retirement of experienced and knowledgeable senior staff (and the inadequate back-filling
by trained replacements), the exodus is further abetted not only by retaliatory contractor
firms, but by bureaucrats hell-bent on taking the slow road up the safety learning-curve.
When courage is discouraged and retaliation is met with stony silence, good men and
women go elsewhere. After all, what should young public service-oriented professionals
conclude about a system that rewards mediocrity and punishes critical thought? Tamosaitis
parting words are the antithesis of a recruitment drive:

They killed my career. It sends a message to everybody else that they shouldn't raise
issues. Forty-four years of service, a PhD, a recognized expert in nuclear engineering
none of that mattered." from The Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2014, Company Fires
Scientist Who Warned of Hanford Waste Site Problems, by Ralph Vartabedian
As Tamosaitis correctly implies, fear not only destroys candor, it unleashes a selfperpetuating contagion. The 2014 IP Study actually confirms this behavioral tendency,
conceding that the challenges posed by the study:

were exacerbated by issues in communications and instruction from headquarters

program offices to the field offices. In some cases, the process deficiencies also tended
to positively bias the results communicated to senior managementOften, the positive
bias minimized observations related to perceived retaliation or retribution. [Italics added]
In a foxhole exacerbated communications can get somebody killed. Imagine a bomb
headed your way, yet your comrade feels reluctant to tell you. This is no less true of the
nations nuclear waste facilities where compromised storage containers can tick away like
silent bombs. Procrastination is not an option. Fear is a killer. DOE Headquarter culture must
be aggressively and radically receptive to safety concerns surfaced in the field. There simply
is no other way. The stakes are too high.
Following fast on the heels of the Tamosaitis termination, URS (a major subcontractor to
Bechtel National for WTP) fired Donna Busche, an on-site nuclear safety manager, further
stoking Congressional ire. We have suggested that, in a retaliatory culture, an
organizations safety culture must, of necessity, be broken too. This is confirmed to
powerful effect in a recent comment from the dismissed whistleblower. Heres Busche: The
Energy Departments overall safety culture is broken and all they are doing now is sitting idly
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by. from Common Dreams, March 22, 2014, Whistleblower Fired After Voicing Safety
Concerns at Nuclear Site, by Sarah Lazare
On some occasions lofty DOE rhetoric stumbles at its own language game. Such was the
case at a Senate roundtable discussion convened by longtime whistleblower advocate
Senator Claire McCaskill (MO, Dem) earlier this month when Bill Eckroade, Deputy Chief of
Operations in DOEs Office of Health, Safety and Security offered this sleepy bombshell [As
reported in the March 14, 2014 edition of the Weapons Complex Monitor (Vol. 24, No 11)
WTP Has Serious Problem with Whistleblower Culture, Senator Says]:

[Recent whistleblower] allegations had helped to prompt an awakening as to the

importance of safety culture. We have learned a lot about safety culture and how to
assess it, but the Department is growing its competencies in this area as we understand
the results of safety culture reviews, he said, adding, So, you know, although the
Department has not reached maturity in a healthy safety culture, we are clearly learning
the importance of it and growing in our abilities to manage it. But we still have a lot of
problems left to manage.
So, you know, who would think real lives actually hung in the balance? Besides dripping with
carefree nonchalance, the statement begs more questions than it answers. Awakening?
Was DOE Headquarters, until very recently, fast asleep? Maturity? So, seventy years into
the nuclear age and the departments managerial competency is still growing into its safety
mandate? The nations citizens can be forgiven for shuddering over this poor excuse for
proactivity.
Notable too is how the answer barely converges on safetyreal safetylingering instead
over such bloodless abstractions as managing safety culture. This is bureaucratese at its
worst. All at once, the fate, purpose and inherent cynicism of the safety culture study is laid
bare. The bureaucrats have acquired a fresh layer of prevaricating language. Lucky us!
As Senator Ron Wyden (D, Ore) ruefully noted at the Roundtable discussion, nothing has
really changed at Hanford. Nothing, it might be added, except the word-games at DOE
Headquarters ostensibly aimed at Hanford worker safety. So yes, Senator Wyden, we would
agree. Its business-as-usual all over again.

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Bureaucratic stasis can foster superseded technologies and

outmoded practices. Even in the critical realm of safety,
antiquated solutions are continually applied to modern problems.
For example, the Personal Protection Equipment (PPEs) and
garments used in radiation events handling radioactively
contaminated materials have remained unchanged for thirty
years. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of
commercial nuclear power plants has long since abandoned
traditional disposable and launderable solutions for safer, much
more protective dissolvable suits that have the added advantage
of not requiring landfill space. Furthermore these dissolvable suits
are less expensive. As Jim Fannon puts it:

Despite repeated trips to Hanford, Savannah Ridge and other field facilities (where we
encounter a consistently enthusiastic field reception to Orex dissolvable suits), a 99%
waste reduction factor and an 82% adoption rate in the private sector, we continue to
face immobility and non-responsiveness at DOE Headquarters. One might think the icing
on the cake would have been the cost-competitiveness of this solution ($190.3 million in
saving per annum) vis a vis the de facto solutions, particularly as we face such a
challenging fiscal environment. But thats not the case. Bureaucratic inertia is still
winning.
It remains to be seen what PPEs were worn during the 17 Personnel Contamination Events
(PCEs) that occurred at WIPP in February and what role if any they played in failing to
prevent PCEs from occurring.
For the moment, Rome fiddles on while our silent warriors die and safety remains a
tantalizing DOE bumper sticker. Only determined Congressional pressure can make a dent
on an entrenched safety culture that values studies, studies and more studies over the
welfare of its toiling and vulnerable workers.

Norman Ball, MBA, PMP, the author of this White Paper, He can be reached at (703) 459-6458 or
gspress@gmail.com

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