When I originally wrote about Honeywell CEO David Cote threatening the safety of a small town by bringing in under-trained "scabs" (replacement workers ) to run a uranium enrichment facility in Metropolis, IL, some contacted me saying they doubted the safety concerns I cited were as serious. The plant is currently being operated on a skeleton crew of managers and hired scabs who are indeed under-trained.
The Metropolis facility is the only conversion facility in the country that can distill uranium. While the scab workers Honeywell brought in from Louisiana have worked in nuclear facilities, they haven't worked on the process that converts uranium from the somewhat toxic UF4 solid state to the extraordinarily more lethal liquid UF6. For the process of converting uranium to UF6, Honeywell is hoping to use its managers who used to work on these processes years ago according to local workers. In addition to not having worked these jobs in years and, as a result, being generally unfamiliar with them, the managers are liable to be especially unprepared to deal with the conversion plant's control system, which has been altered dramatically in the last few years claims union official John Paul Smith.
Currently, the workers running the plant are unfamiliar with the system they are using and unfamiliar with the processes. This is a uranium enrichment facility from which even the slightest leak of UF6 could wipe out the entire town.
For this reason, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not allowed the plant to resume production of UF6 according to local community and union sources. Local community and union officials claim that Honeywell is currently using all the political connections it can to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to re-open it.
Honeywell originally said they would start up production of the deadly UF6 on Wednesday, however, Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors would not allow it. The Nuclear Regulatory Inspectors informed local community and union officials that they would not allow it because on Aug. 25 a round of urine tests on workers showed an unusually high amount of uranium in workers' urine. The workers were not permitted to return to working with the uranium. Neither the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or Honeywell could be reached for comment to confirm the claims of local community members and union officials.
Since uranium sometimes builds up in the blood stream of workers working around it for years, the high levels of uranium in the workers' urine was not, in itself, unusual. None of the workers who were tested, however, had ever been tested for high levels of uranium, which meant they had been contaminated with the uranium since the last round of testing earlier this summer. More shockingly, one of the inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had unusually high levels of uranium in his urine tests.
According to union spokesman John Paul Smith, degrading safety under the leadership of Cote has been a top concern of workers over the last few years. Under the management of Cote, the TOP safety programs of union-management safety committee have been disbanded. Under the TOP system, each incident was investigated jointly by a full-time union representative and a full-time company representative, who each filed an independent report on the matter. Because the union's workers would suffer the most from toxic uranium exposure, it had the biggest incentive to make sure the plant was safe, and thus, often wrote tougher reports than the company. For this reason TOP was disbanded.
In place of TOP, Honeywell implemented its own program of behavioral safety, without the workers' input. If there was a problem or a leak, a worker was deemed responsible and disciplined for that problem even if it occurred because of aging equipment. If a worker reported a problem in their section, he was often cited for misconduct and liable to be fired. One worker who reported a routine problem was fired after 30 years of experience and no prior record of safety violations according to sources familiar with the firing. The threat of firing workers for reporting safety problems actually creates a disincentive for workers to report problems.
Workers claim that Cote is far more interested in keeping his record profits high than actually protecting workers and the surrounding community. During contract negotiations, Cote has proven this by risking nuclear fallout in order to demand that uranium workers agree to cut their retiree health care and pension plans.
That is why today, the 350,000 members of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees called on President Obama to fire Cote from the so-called Deficit Commission. They said:
Mr. Cote's cruel and calculated behavior towards workers at its hexafluoride plant in Metropolis, Ill. clearly illustrates that he's unqualified and inappropriate to help decide issues such as whether to reduce the federal deficit by cutting programs like social security or by upgrading the faulty military contracting process, from which Honeywell benefits.Mr. Cote should be evicted from the so-called Deficit Commission immediately before he can use that position to harm all Americans the way he is injuring Honeywell workers in Illinois.
Since Cote is one of President Obama's personal appointments to the Deficit Commission, it falls upon the president to decide whether or not a man such as Cote should continue to serve on his commission.
UPDATE: Spokesman Roger Hannah of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) told Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post on Friday - "We have done a number of inspections over the last several weeks looking at remaining parts of the process...At this point we haven't identified any issues that would preclude them starting up that process...If they notify us that they're starting up, we are prepared to send inspectors to monitor their process for the first 72 hours around the clock.".
Editor's note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the Metropolis facility was the only conversion facility in the world that can distill uranium. Metropolis is the only one of its kind in the United States. Similar facilities exist overseas.
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Henry Ford
Now whatever happened to this kind of thinking?
http://www.wsiltv.com/p/news_details.php?newsID=11011&type=top
http://www.wsiltv.com/p/news_details.php?newsID=11011&type=top
What kind of management is it that they can't make a decent profit on this operation without firing their experienced union works and bringing in scabs?
This is your "trickle down economics" utopia. A nuclear power plant cutting corners so this capitalist can buy another yacht. They should what they do in France and lock management in their office and refuse them food and water until they capitualate because nothing short of that or MORE is going to change any of this.
Miles "Suicidal Tendencies" Long
Time to do away with the entire thing, and immediately!
What facts do you have to support this?
Think of it this way. You live in your city and drive your car. How long does it take you to adapt to another city in a different car? On the surface, it's all the same. However, even through you know the controls and can read the signs, it's much easier to make a wrong turn in the other city.
I'll take the veterans instead...
You union hacks have priced yourselves out of jobs. I have no doubt that the engineers who designed the plant can do a rather fine job of training replacement workers who will do just fine.
Time to learn a lesson Sparky - nobody is irreplaceable, especially union hacks who have bankrupted innumerable American corporations
time to learn a lesson whatchanged2, the unions are far less worthy of blame than the poor business strategy employed by American corporations of the past 30 years.
Note that China also has a killer economy --- and no union.
Your theory about all the engineers training might apply, except for the fact that they aren't familiar with process themselves. If they were, they would be running by now. The employees in the Union have trained and qualified employees in these jobs for 50 years. Not engineers, not supervisors, and not replacement workers.
Who knows, under this scenario Honeywell personnel may be assisting the NRC in finding reasons not to startup UF6 production but putting on the front that they are trying to take advantage of the Force Majeure contract provisions. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but when it comes to Honeywell's environmental compliance record (look it up online), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the company has an unwritten policy to ignore environmental regulations.
Here's a typcial Force Majeure provision, "No Party shall be liable for any failure to perform its obligations where such failure is as a result of Acts of Nature (including fire, flood, earthquake, storm, hurricane or other natural disaster), war, invasion, act of foreign enemies, hostilities (whether war is declared or not), civil war, rebellion, revolution, insurrection, military or usurped power or confiscation, terrorist activities, nationalization, government sanction, blockage, embargo, labour dispute, strike, lockout or interruption or failure of power sources."
It doesn't fit your scenario...
What do you think that Pres. Obama is up to? Seriously! I mean, some of these things are so dumb that they seem like they have to be either seriously malicious, or unfathomably brilliant. This particular one seems like an appointment straight out of Dick Cheney.
(Also, what does it say about how tough jobs are to come by these days when folks will even put up with elevated uranium levels in order to stay employed?)
As far as your comparison of the nuclear industry to construction, I have not yet heard of a trend of cancer from construction workers. Can you same the same for nuclear workers?