Shaking up the troops, blowing the taxpayers' bucks

A nuclear reactor operator, the worker, was disciplined when management at INL (Idaho National Laboratory) and the Department of Energy put on a great show for the public by showing that Washington is in charge. The whole story is too long to copy here. Go to GOOGLE and enter "Grossenbacher Guevera Argonne" and then click on the following:


[PDF]
Department of Energy
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTMLMr. Grossenbacher remarked that when BEA. assumed responsibility for the site, formally called the Argonne-West Site, the workforce was ...hss.energy.gov/enforce/eas/EA-2007-06.pdf - Similar pages

To make this long story short, I grabbed the following bits from the lengthy documents and mailed them to Grossenbacher and Guevera along with my cogent observations:

Department of Energy
Washington, DC 20585
Arnold Guevara, Director, HS-40

Mr. Grossenbacher remarked that when BEA assumed responsibility for the site, formally called the Argonne-West Site, the workforce was found to have an expert-based culture and did not exhibit sound nuclear safety work practices.

The above is a rather weird statement.
expert-based culture and (therefore) did not exhibit sound nuclear safety work practices.
Also, formally should likely be formerly.

This action was followed by the suspension of the reactor operators’ qualifications, conduct of a root cause analysis, and performance of two management assessments.
That suspension is uncalled for. Also, I do not believe that all of the operators were thus victimized and the apostrophe is likely in the wrong place.

Of course, all of the above has cost a lot of the taxpayers' money. There is no tangible benefit. If I were a potential user, I would try very hard to find some other way to get the job done.

Bob Leyse

Now, regarding the taxpayers' dollars, look at the following list of participants in the above exhibition!

List of Attendees


Office of Enforcement
Arnold Guevara, Director, HS-40
Martha Thompson, Acting Deputy Director, HS-40
Kathy McCarty, Acting Director, HS-41
Richard Day, Acting Director, HS-42
Steven Zobel, Enforcement Officer, HS-42

Idaho Operations Office
Ray Furstenau, Deputy Director
Robert Stallman, Operations and Safety Officer
Jacquelyn Carrozza, PAAA Coordinator
Bill Hamel, Assistant Manager for Infrastructure Support
Dary Newbry, Operations and Safety Officer
Richard Dickson, Lead Health Physicist
Christian Natoni, Facilities and Infrastructure Support
Mark Gardner, Supervisor, Quality and Safety Division


Battelle Energy Alliance
John Grossenbacher, Laboratory Director
Arthur Clark, Deputy Laboratory Directory for Operations
Dave Richardson, Director for Nuclear Operations
Alan Wagner, PAAA Program Manager
Sherry Kontes, Nuclear Operations Compliance Officer


Battelle Memorial Institute
James Tarpinian, Environment, Safety, Health and Quality Officer



And, there was also a lot of travel and per deim money floating around!

It took me back to my school days in Kwaunee, Wisconsin. Our school, K-12, was in one building on the main drag, Milwaukee Street. The playground was on the main street and very often a ball would be hit into the street, so we would go after it. No kid ever got hit by traffic, but Roosevelt's New Deal sent dough for a fence. That lengthened the recovery time when the ball cleared the fence. But we had experts in scaling that fence to the chagrin of the Superintendent. The best scaler was Bobby Conard, "Termite." So, the Super laid for him, and grabbed him when he did his trick, and beat the hell out of him within the viewing of all. Of course, the Super was usually not around, and the incorrigible Termite stayed on the job! However, Termite never became a nuclear plant operator.