Company fires scientist who warned of Hanford waste site problems

The meeting raised Tamosaitis' hopes that the long-standing problems with safety at the project would get high-level attention. Tamosaitis, a systems engineer with a doctoral degree who had directed a staff of 100 scientists until he began expressing concerns about safety, said URS officials showed up and ordered him to box up his personal belongings, then escorted him out. Executive director of Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group that assisted a number of whistle-blowers at the federal complex, said the dismissal was "Clearly another act of retribution against Walter Tamosaitis." The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal agency that oversees the nuclear weapons complex, raised its own concerns about similar issues and in 2011 backed up Tamosaitis' concerns.

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