Hanford nuclear weapons site whistle-blower wins $4.1-million settlement
Source: Los Angeles Times
When Walter Tamosaitis warned in 2011 that the Energy Department’s plans for a waste treatment plant at the former Hanford nuclear weapons complex were unsafe, he was demoted and put in a basement room with cardboard boxes and plywood for office furniture..
Tamosaitis had been leading a team of 100 scientists and engineers in designing a way to immobilize millions of gallons of highly toxic nuclear sludge as thick as peanut butter. The sludge, which could deliver a lethal dose of radiation to a nearby person within minutes, is stored in leaking underground tanks near the Columbia River in Washington state.
Two years later, Tamosaitis was fired after 44 years with San Francisco-based engineering firm URS, which was later acquired by Los Angeles-based AECOM. He filed a wrongful termination suit but encountered some initial legal setbacks, and it looked as if he had been blackballed from the industry.
But on Wednesday, Tamosaitis won a $4.1-million settlement from AECOM, among the largest known legal damages paid out to a whistle-blower in the Energy Department’s vast nuclear waste cleanup program.
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Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-hanford-whistleblower-settlement-20150813-story.html