From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: MM: 10 WORST: MARTIN MARIETTA
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 09:15:37 GMT

[From the Dec 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor.  Subscription info below]

MARTIN MARIETTA POISONING WHISTLEBLOWERS

DEFENSE CONTRACTOR MARTIN MARIETTA is among the Monitor's Ten Worst this
year for punishing an employee who voiced concern about health and
safety issues at a company-run facility.  In February, the U.S.  Labor
Department found that Martin Marietta Energy Systems, contracted by the
Department of Energy to operate the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, retaliated against an employee whistleblower by ordering
him to sit in a room filled with toxic and radioactive chemicals and do
useless work.  The Labor Department said that the company had violated
the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Toxic Substances
Control Act by punishing Charles Varnadore for raising safety issues.

Varnadore, a technician at Oak Ridge since 1974, publicized lax health
and safety conditions at the facility, once appearing on a CBS evening
news segment about elevated cancer rates among Oak Ridge personnel.
The CBS report was based on a study conducted by a North Carolina
epidemiologist which found excess cancers among facility employees over
the last 40 years.

After Varnadore appeared on CBS in March 1991, he was transferred into a
room filled with drums of toxic and radioactive waste where he was
instructed to test, identify and weigh 717 chemicals.  In September
1991, Varnadore was moved to another waste storage room containing
mercury, radioactive materials and asbestos.  Marietta moved Varnadore
out of the second room after his lawyers complained in November 1991.
Varnadore himself underwent surgery for colon cancer in 1989.

"It's one of the most horrid forms of repression and retaliation that I
have ever seen," Edward A. Slavin, Jr. of the Government Accountability
Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that works to protect
whistleblowers, told Multinational Monitor.

In February, Clyde Hopkins, president of Martin Marietta Energy Systems,
told a congressional committee that for purposes of "national
security," references to uranium were deleted from documents accompany-
ing waste that was shipped from Oak Ridge to disposal facilities not
licensed to handle radioactive material.  In Deer Park, Texas, waste
shipments containing radioactive material from Oak Ridge have been
incinerated over the past 11 years.

Martin Marietta and the DOE have also been busy wasting taxpayer money.
A study released in August by the General Accounting Office found that
the DOE and the company had spent nearly $500,000 on alcohol, golf,
dinners and other entertainment between 1986 and 1991 in connection with
the sale of government-owned uranium to foreign customers.

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