Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Whistleblower Issues in the Unclear Industry: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Regulation of the Committee on Environment and Public Works United States Senate One Hundred Third Congress First Season, July 15, 1993
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:00 a.m. in room 406, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding. Present: Senators Lieberman, Metzenbaum, and Simpson. Opening Statement of Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman, U. S. Senator from the State of Connecticut Senator Lieberman. Good morning. This hearing of the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Regulation will come to order. Today the subcommittee is conducting a hearing on the NRC's treatment of whistleblowers in the nuclear industry. For purposes of definition, whistleblowers are people who inform the NRC of nuclear safety concerns, or people who allege that they were intimidated and harassed by their employer because they raised safety concerns. The NRC's Inspector General has just issued a report which I requested on the NRC's handling of allegations of intimidation and harassment that are raised by employees in the nuclear industry. The IG's report contains some disturbing statistics on the small number of investigations undertaken by the NRC in response to allegations of violations of the whistleblower protection statute, which I will want to ask the NRC about today. For example, the NRC IG reports that between October of 1988 and April of 1993 the NRC received a total of 609 retaliation complaints and initiated full-scale investigations of 44 of them. Only 7 have resulted in enforcement action - seven enforcement actions out of 609 complaints over a 4 1/2-year period of time. That record raises serious questions about the NRC's conduct in investigating and acting on whistleblower complaints. To indicate why I feel that is so, according to the NRC's IG, the Department of Labor has found in favor of whistleblowers, or allegers, as they are called in that report, in 58 cases over the last 5 years, and 41 other cases have been settled. Of those cases, approximately 100, the NRC has completed only 8 investigations, and another 13 are outstanding. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
