are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning jeff reisman jeff reitman is a seattle based technologist with specialties in strategic consulting social media development facebook nonprofit community organizing and freelance writing and he is one of the co organizers for initiative one o three the initiative two and corporate personhood in seattle jeff thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning and thanks a lot mike good morning everyone so start out give us a brief overview what is initiative one o three yeah well initiative one of the three really addresses the heart of the problems that we have with corporate influence on our government and on our society it strips the rights of corporations to spend money on election and so restores fair elections in seattle it bans corporate lobbying except in public forms so it restores a level playing field in government so that everyone has an equal voice the people and and companies that need the ear of government it strips corporations of constitutional rights that have been granted by basically judge made decisions because the word corporation doesn't appear in the constitution but over the last hundred twenty five years they've been accumulating these judge made rights and these are the kind of powers that lawyers often use for corporations to overturn community rules so what we're doing is we're basically taking these away from them within the city of seattle we're also by doing this in seattle we're working with other communities in places like spokane bellingham portland pittsburgh where there are these emerging movements where cities are standing up and saying hey we are we are communities aren't working w with these corporate rights and we need to restore democracy to our communities all right so tell us how did you get involved in this issue to begin with yeah things well i had written an article for the seattle weekly back in two thousand and four about microsoft and what kind of community citizen microsoft was and one of the things that i identified is that the company was dodging the state's royalty tax payer using a small office in nevada and at the time they were saving between close to about seventy million dollars a year it had grown from about forty million dollars a year when they started the process in one thousand nine hundred eighty and it was kind of concerning because the company was out there telling taxpayers that we needed to spend more money on education and here they were with this accounting that was saving them so much money and then flash forward to two thousand and nine when we had these big two billion dollars budget deficit so i took a look at the tax dodge and its status and how much had microsoft save since one thousand nine hundred eight and it turned out that they'd saved about a billion and a quarter dollars which was almost half the deficit or more than half the deficit at that time and i found that really confounding like how is it that the deficit is i mean there's lots of tax dodges on our state laws but how is it that one company could be saving so much money as to account for half of the deficit so i went out there i started blogging i started this blog microsoft tax dodge dot com i started but i actually started writing the  legislature i also was trying to talk to the media about it but started reading all the legislators about it and i thought well this is a no brainer and i also thought microsoft would care too because there you want to be a good corporate citizen they're always talking about education in our community and  basically what happened is democrat ross hunter who is a former microsoft executive who is chair of the finance committee he led a change to the state's royalty tax so rather than being a tax on worldwide sales it's now a tax on just sales to washington state customers so i know this is a bit technical but basically what he did is he redefined the tax so he made it so that instead of taxing you know fifty percent of microsoft's profits that come from licensing he's now chocks ing maybe half a percent of their profits and essentially the company is really not dodging any tax anymore because they were able to lobby in get ross hunter to change the tax for them and then shortly after that the governor  pointed another microsoft employee susan del bene to run the department of revenue i used to work with susan and so i know that she doesn't have an extensive background in tax and so we have now like you know the fox guarding the hen house essentially and  then shortly after that microsoft announced a five million dollars a year scholarship program to pay for technical graduates at the u deb and the governor starts going out parading and praising the company and boeing for putting in this tiny amount of money when actually the company is saving  you know way more in taxes and i just thought this was horrible i could see that basically when an activist brings facts to the legislature which i thought we had a great legislature great democratic party here that at that level they're not going to make change and so i that was kind of the final straw for me as a person as a resident here in seattle and i realized that change had to come some other way so over the past six or eight years i've been working with a group called the community environmental legal defense fund also known as seldom and we've done some democracy school trainings of theirs here in seattle we've hosted their leaders formally richard grossman who sadly passed away this year and thomas lindsey  runs the organization and from that work it really changed my perspective on how to what my theory of change was how change happens and what are some of the issues that are affecting our democracy here of definitely has more of a grassroots strategy because of compared to the top down traditional methods yes i mean just to keep this brief basically sell if started in pennsylvania and these small communities these townships came to them and said hey we have this ten thousand head hog farm that wants to come in and we're afraid of it ruining our community or this this company is trying to spread sewage sludge over our fields or giving sewage sludge to farmers and actually killed a couple of kids and we want to stop this practice or there's this huge gravel mine that wants to move in across the street from an elementary school we'd like to stop this practice so they started working through the federal regulatory system which was set up basically to protect the environment and to regulate these corporations and what they found is that they would basically go to court and they would they would maybe win a small victory but then the corporation would come back and ultimately the regulatory system is designed to permit pollution and permit corporate harm in our communities and so they realize that as long as they worked in the regulatory system they were being funneled down a path that their energy was being funneled down a path that was structured  permit the activities that they didn't want in their communities and so they actually were working with a lot of rural republican landowners people who really had a visceral sense of democracy and they're like well we just want to say no like why can't we tell this corporation that we don't want them in our in our town and so the community environmental legal defense fund started looking at it differently and they started writing ordinances in these townships that said hey we're go corporate hog farming and we're going to ban and sewage sludge spreading and it really fundamentally changed their approach to activism and it really the peak was about two years ago pittsburgh the city council used an ordinance buy sell the to ban fracking and that's been widely reported but what hasn't been reported about that is if you go and read the ordinance that pittsburgh passed one of the key elements of that ordinance is that it strips corporations of personhood rights it strips corporations of their corporate constitutional powers that have been created by judges judges and judge me judge made law over the last hundred twenty five years and those clauses are really what is the critical teeth to these ordinances and it basically says the community is deciding that corporate constitutional powers are anti democratic and that they don't want them in their communities and they're standing up to federal law settled law and saying this isn't working we need to change it we as residents are changing it and the same that same language is in r c l initiative one of three and how has the pit ordinance fared since it was passed as far as i know no companies have tried to drill in fact the companies have given up on drilling in pittsburgh which is interesting because they there's thousands of drilling contracts that they have there and so  what has happened interestingly is that the state has controlled by the the lobbyists of the drilling companies have passed something called the actor i think it's measure thirteen or maybe measure sixteen i forget which and basically they're trying to say that it's now illegal for communities to pass laws related to drilling and so you can see there that in our taxpayer dollars are going to fund a legislature that is really controlled by lobbying and the lobbyists are now writing law that is undermining our local democracies it's really outrageous and this is why lobbying is one of the things that we're stripping the rights of corporations to do in seattle with initiative one of three all right i want to add one more thing so in new york another community working with cell have passed a fracking ban as well and recently the new york's one of the new york state courts upheld that community's right to set law restricting corporate activities and so that's a really huge precedent for this kind of local law making and we're really excited about that so let's talk more about specifically what the your initiative were do for seattle maybe break it down into the specific elements that are listed in that long term so what  of three does is it's basically elevating people's rights of corporate rights and it's stripping corporate rights in order to secure people's rights and so there  are various clauses that sort of are interrelated and balance each other so the first things that it does let's walk through some of the rights and some of the restrictions so it creates a right to fair elections which means that we have an electoral process in seattle that's free from corporate inner interference and so what that what the band that's related to that is that we are directly taking on citizens united we are saying that corporate spending on elections is distorting our democracy here  in seattle and we're basically banning electioneering that corporations will not be allowed to be able to make contributions or expenditures on elections in seattle and what's different about this than say you know the citizens united decision at the supreme court angered a lot of people but it was really an abstract decision you had this right wing interest group that wanted to spend as much money advertising this and to hillary clinton maybe it actually wasn't really about any particular community and it was amazing how upset people got about it but what we would have here is we're trying to make a law that basically says that corporations can't spend money on elections and we're challenging state and federal precedents to tell us that we can't decide what we want in seattle so then we're establishing a right to clean government and what that means is that corporations cannot kind of go behind the scenes and make policy with legislature with with the city government lobby the government and basically if they want to talk in influence government they need to do it in a public forum and so what this may mean is really driving transparency across city operations so one thing that comes right to mind is actually this all the talk right now going on about the new n b a every night keep seeing articles like mike mcginn and his name's hansen or like they want to relate arena you know it's like where did this come from like how long have they been talking about it just keeps seeming like there's this whole plan that's been hatched now  of three would make it so that those initial discussions would be happening in the open and every discussion that magma again wants to have with a potential n b a owner is going to happen in public and we have the right to be a part of that process we should not be having these half baked plans dumped on us as the details slowly leak out through the press like for example what i read on public the last week about the city putting in like with one hundred million dollars for les and for this n b a area come on this process needs to be more open and transparent and really disappointed with the mayor for even participating in keeping this quiet for a while so this is one of the reasons that lobbying is a part of this the next three is really the right to self government and this is really just inherent in our country's founding principles and in our constitution and we're just sort of reasserting those rights because as corporations have built constitutional powers through these judge made legal decisions and these legal efforts over the years we feel like our democracy in seattle and around the country has been eroded so when we look at the restrictions what we're doing is we're we're taking away corporate personhood but we're also taking away corporate constitutional rights often this has to do with we're taking away preemptive powers where corporations can often use state or federal laws to overturn local community rules and we're also including language in the ordinance that's basically saying that the residents of seattle recognize  that corporate power has grown too large and that there need to be changes over time to state level law and federal law and probably the constitution so one of the things that runs parallel to our effort is the move to amend effort to amend the constitution so if we go back to like the women's right to vote you know when the constitution came into being it allowed slavery and it a lot and it didn't allow women the right to vote and took a long time for those rights to be fought for the women's right to vote for example was fought in many different local communities and there were many conflicting laws and essentially what one of the three is is it's a law that's challenging corporate power same with spokane same with bellingham pittsburgh there's all these flourishes of activity where communities are stepping up in asserting rights over corporate power and it wasn't until the nineteenth amendment which actually took forty or fifty years till that was ratified at the constitutional level so the move to a man is a longer term effort that sort of r resident an important part of this process the real difference with one of three is that we are making law in seattle as soon as we get this passed whereas move to a man requires the permission of all the state and federal legislators and representatives who are currently bought yes let me talk about some of these other rights we're elevating the rights of people to really set a baseline for our democracy here in seattle so one of the real problems that we've had is a police force with a lot of problems so so many  problems that the federal department of justice has now ruled that changes have to come to the city so one of the things in issue one of three does this really simply it says that citizens have a right to to have oversight over the police and specifically the office of professional accountability factional accountability that does investigative work in the and sets down policy around administrative issues currently reports in the chain of command to the police chief initiative  three would make that report to the mare and i should say that the mare's recent report where he's sort of setting a negotiating standpoint with the d o j it actually doesn't even do this has a lot of good recommendations that i command it does not  give citizens oversight over the police so our initiative would do that it creates a right to internet network neutrality which basically provides for the current status quo of the internet where  everybody's content like a small podcast or like mike or a small blogger like me at microsoft tax dot com we all have our bets delivered at the same speed as microsoft's bit and why is this in this initiative well it's because the internet has become a core piece of our democracy locally nationally internationally and so we have to protect it as well initiative one of three also includes rights for workers it guarantees workers constitutional rights in the workplace includes rights for neighborhoods so that if there are major commercial zoning changes neighborhoods would have approval over those changes it includes rights nature which for example sell that has worked in ecuador to provide rights for nature in their constitution rights for nature essentially give anyone in the community standing to stand up and protect the environment so for example and we'll probably talk more about this the coal train that's coming to washington both bellingham and actually now in ballard we're going to talk more about this but essentially this coal trains these huge forty eight million pounds of call from montana is going to come through part of it through ballard part of it through bellingham and the trains run open dust just leaks out the whole way the journey you get call all over the ground into the ecosystem this has been reported by the seattle times that we have no way to stop that today there's no laws on the books that allow us to say that we can stop these coal trains and so writes from nature actually it does give us the right to stand up and say that these coltrane's there's no way to mitigate protections the environment so we need that to be changed so that we can protect the environment  so that's basically the initiative and how it works or it's so i could see on several of these for instance productions constitutional rights in the workplace seem right there that the chamber of commerce will line up against you on the other side of this you know because you know that's going to be very costly to businesses you have a question there well do you  well not being a business owner it just seems that having worked in large corporations i can attest to that my rights there were very minimal yeah they could read any of  my e mails if they if they chose to i don't believe they did you know why i didn't have the right to speak my mind in many situations you know so yeah i mean i mean just off the bat the corporations are spending a lot of money to restrict know they have security teams that have investigative teams they're reading they have teams id teams that i mean my businesses are probably the least democratic institutions in the country yeah well i guess what i'm saying is that they're actually spending a lot of money right now trying to restrict our rights so actually not being able to do that is going to allow them to have more money that they can use elsewhere but the real issue is that that's not really the issue the issue is do we believe that we live in a democracy where we have the rights granted to us in the constitution when we walk out of our houses and when we walk into the workplace or do we believe that we have to surrender our rights to go into the workplace and earn a living and i think one of the key some of the key reasons for this is you know  a lot of corporations are are creating a lot of public harm and they're they're doing it with secret initiatives like for example i have never received any information from microsoft employees about their tax i've never  information well actually i said that's not true actually i have received one tip and the person was very concerned about confidentiality about the issue they were afraid that they would get fired for speaking out this is one reason why it's important to preserve our constitutional rights when we go to work so that the people who work there are free to let the community know about harms that are happening so in a way it's it's kind of whistleblower protection that's one part of it protections from unlawful search and seizure and so the regulatory systems of our government are often stymied to find out what corporations are doing in our community because they don't have the authority to get the data that they need from corporations corporations stand up and say oh we can't give that information it's in secret or it's trade secret or it would harm us if we gave it away and it's just patently ridiculous like our regulatory bodies need to have complete purview into what happening in companies and in our communities that 's one of the reasons we strip corporate constitutional rights so it begs the question of i mean all this sounds great it sounds utopian to a degree but you've got a lot lined up against it you've got these corporations and their government entities that will not want to cooperate with this and will just take all this to court you know basically i would imagine that let's say this this did get passed you know in the first iteration or future iterations and and then you're looking at the rest of our life time of court battles from well and you know i mean that's one view in pittsburgh none of the drilling companies have filed suit against the city to drill i think that this initiative would show that seattle is in lightened its leading the country we're not prohibiting business we're not prohibiting capitalism  community here and of business community and tons of intelligent people what we're doing is we're basically creating transparency in our government we are elevating the rights of people i mean i think that we will be a beacon for really a great exe civic example of how city of the future should operate and i don't see any reason why that won't be and continue to be attractive to business all right going back for again the specific example in the first item about fair elections basically push this liquor privatization out to voters and i grew up in los angeles where we had private liquor stores so personally i don't have a strong opinion about what's better for our community but but costco would not you know but i can certainly make a point that twenty two million dollars distorts the democratic process and maybe is really legislation driven by corporate power rather than something that's really more balanced and given time for the civic  essentially if one of the three is passed by the voters a company like costco would not be able to spend money on the seattle media market to influence an election they could spend it in other cities around washington but seattle is a huge part of the state voting block so instantly the state initiative process the ability of these companies to advertise to influence elections at the state level would be limited another example i think is the american chemistry council a few years ago put one and a half million dollars to pretty much turn the election on the plastic bag band and they're still kind of keeping their fingers in that issue as i understand it they would not be able to do that so essentially we're just creating a level playing field again so that people have voices the same as the corporate voice thousand six or seven hundred voters from seattle to sign our petition and it has to be done on paper not over the internet for example and so we need about twenty five to thirty thousand signatures so that's the process we've started we're basically building awareness for one of three we are building a volunteer base of people who want to gather signatures we've decided not we're very grassroots effort we've decided not to spend money on signature gathering which is something that does we just feel that this is a citizens initiative to restore democracy we don't want to be tainted by paid signature gathers so we've made a choice that whatever money we bring into the campaign we're not going to spend it on paid signature gatherers so basically people can go to our web site i want to three dot org they can download a petition they can get their friends and family and colleagues to sign it and then they can send it in to us they can also volunteer to come out into the streets with us to festivals and events and gather a broader number of signatures tomorrow the ballard farmer's market for example talking to people handing out flyers gathering signatures so our whole effort right now is focused on that signature gathering  and we could use your listeners help if they would right now go to i want to three dot org go to the download petitions printed out there's a one that you can just get five signatures and send it in or one that's larger with ten or one very large of fourteen print out the one you want get it fill it out send it in to us you know drop it off that university temple mount that united methodist church in the u district that information's on our web say we need your help this isn't going to happen if you listening right now don't do this i'm just one person we have a couple of other organizers people are interested in this they're passionate about it but honestly we're going to fail unless everybody who hears this message that it resonates with actually takes the time to get involved and participate and so right now that means that you make your listeners they need to get involved in you just share the website with their friends and colleagues you can join our facebook page and share it on facebook this is purely up to people of seattle who care about this actually take action right now and every day and spreading the word and gathering signatures because i can tell you i'm not going to be able to carry this on my back myself i need the help of everyone we need to do this together and do you have organizing meetings people can come in yeah so monday night we having an organizing meeting that we have an event calendar on the website at i want to three dot org will be putting more events there's a media page for i want to three envision seattle so you can come to any of those and get trained in talking about the initiative using talking points for gathering signatures or just have questions answered about the initiative and the initiative process and then wednesday night the sierra club is actually hosting a meeting to talk about the coal train which if we have some time we can talk a little bit more about and the coltrane would basically send forty eight million pounds of coal or tonnes of coal through ballard and it would mean round the clock trains coal dust everywhere  an initiative one of three by stripping corporate constitutional rights and establishing rights for nature gives our community the tools we need to stand up and say no we do not believe that we should be contributing to global greenhouse emissions we do not believe that we should have local train traffic to that degree we do not want diesel pollution in ballard we do not want coal pollution in ballard basically initiative one of three is the way to stop the coal train when we're very we are unfortunately us your name and your job title and your duties for your job my name is donna bushy i am the manager of environmental and nuclear safety my current job is through to coordinate the preparation of the dangerous waste permit which is what we use to demonstrate compliance to the state environmental space and we coordinate the safety basis documents for all four of the deal with nuclear facilities at the waste treatment plant are you still currently employed by yes i am yours yes i am and i am still keep personnel in the back to contract with the department of energy all right but you have come forward as a whistle blowers are correct yes i have and what is the basis of that primarily over i have been on this particular project since early two thousand and nine i've been raising significant issues related to the adequacy of the safety documents and the adequacy of safety being implemented in the design and over you know probably the first two years it was ok but things have started to heat up where as i continue to hold you know my position to insist that we do things safely and the treatment by both ductile and u r s has really caused me to have concern that my job was in jeopardy so i filed for whistleblower protection because a specific actions that they had taken that led me to believe i was being retaliated against harassed a very hostile working environment so i filed for protection with the department of labor so talk about the relationship between the d o a your ass and bechtol ok the department of energy is the owner and the operator of what we call the office of river protection it's a specific department of energy office there at hanford there are several it's the one that i'm affiliated with they have a prime contract with that little national corporation on that contract u r s which i work for is a sub contractor to bechtol ok so they have a they have a teaming arrangement and they are the prime subcontractor that that the will use predominantly in the areas of nuclear safety and commissioning the plants so i was brought there in two thousand and nine because of my experience in developing safety documents the department of energy was very pivotal in getting me on the project to make sure because i knew of my standards and you know performance on other projects so when i was brought to the project i was added to the beccles contract with the dip hartmann of energy as key personnel so what that means is i'm highlighted in the contract as being the individual responsible for providing that specific element for to the department of energy you go into some details about items that you perceive as significant problems in this project the most the most significant safety issues are also  would say very linked with a lot of the technical issues on our pretreatment facility so the way the project is designed we have the hanford tanks that are another contractor with the department of energy so there's one hundred  seventy seven underground storage tanks with a lot of highly radioactive waste the pretreatment facility is to receive that waste ok through an underground storage line in the in condition that waste it'll it'll take out the  example and then take it on to the rest of the three other nuclear facilities that particular facility has issues on they go we currently have not solved how are we going to mix the waste how are we going to transport the waste from one tank to another tank how are we going to adequately control criticality how are we going to control hydrogen detonations in either vessels or pipes so there's many many technical issues with the design and by nature there are safety issues if we don't know how we're going to do the act activity and then my organization can go in and help build in additional layers of safety on top of that it's kind of a compounding problem so since i entered the project there's many of those technical issues were known but as we continue to try to solve them the design has progressed and with the design progressing without the safety issues being resolved or the technical issues we get to a point that every day it gets a little harder right so they've poured the walls they've they've they've placed specific equipment so in some cases we can put fire barriers where we're supposed to put fire barriers to make sure that we protect our equipment so it's a very big facility i mean it's bigger than a football field it's several football fields it's a very big process and there are many many technical issues but how far are we in this process and i think were approximately sixty percent designed if if if i remember correctly in about twenty to thirty percent constructed but you know that's not something i necessarily pay attention to i'm focused on making sure that when that the designers the bechdel designers  actually working to figure out how to put place the pipes in the plant or how many filters do we need or what types of filters that my specialist my nuclear safety specialist are making sure that the right specifications are getting into that design so i'm focused on getting safety into the design so i don't really pay it you know keep a check mark on how much construction we have that's you know the safety professionals were focused on getting it into the design you know not how far along we get so we prefer to get it in before you build it as opposed to after you build it trying to back that and how many specialists do you have working for you i think approximately i bet i have upwards of one hundred people now between environmental and nuclear safety and did you have any hand in selecting those people who didn't hear the bulk of the recently there has been a significant ever to actually hire when i when i took over the organization it was completely understaffed for the size of the complexity of the facilities so i would say the first year year and a half of my of my tenure i was focused on getting the budget so that i could go out and hire those people so we've aggressively hired i would say twenty to thirty people in the last year or so in bringing those on and trying to get them into you know into the project but it's very complex so even though i've got twenty new resources they have to get trained they have to understand the problems and they may be great specialists but it does take time to get them up to speed so when did you first start getting resistance to the safety features that you wanted to implement that's that's that's a difficult question because i do it every day i would say the the biggest resistance probably came around the summer of two thousand and nine where it started the defense nuclear facility safety board was asking a lot of questions reviewed some of the projects position and i'm like no we can't do it that way that's not adequate the specific issue had happened at that time to be how we control hydrogen in our pipes so that particular issue is still unresolved i've still had the same position i've testified now twice to in public forums with the defense nuclear facility safety board on that particular issue and that is to me again this is this is my perception of how i'm being treated that is the most significant area where i get pushback from back to all in my corporation because i'm not supporting you know list is good enough it's reasonably conservative so my concerns have a members all on how we're going to control hydrogen in those pipes prior to this had you had much interaction on the project with the defense nuclear facility safety board and throughout my career since i've done nuclear safety i've interface with the defense nuclear facilities safety board on this on a hand to hand for projects when i worked at rocky flats i worked with the site reps there in my previous tenure with hanford i worked with them i used to work for the four corp so i've worked with them off and on for twenty plus years so at that point in time in two thousand and nine you had already had a regular report with them yes ok yes and was that unusual at the time for them to show concern with that particular part of the project no that they are actually you know they're a group that's actually mandated you know by federal law they have a charter to do oversight of the department of energy and they have been steadfast in the in the twenty plus years i've i've had the pleasure of working with them they're very steadfast in doing adequate detailed design reviews so they will normally go in and review every contractor around the complex hanford's nothing special so in the summer of two thousand and nine is where they were starting to ask some of the same questions and i had we then moved on those those those comments were not resolved and then it kind of excel aerated into a public meeting in the october of two thousand and ten so those issues continued to fester lots of internal disagreements however the design continues right so so as you know i think that's a lot of what i consider the nx and the concerns are we're continuing to build the plant but we haven't resolved the technical issues so after two thousand and nine did you notice a market increase in resistance from either back to zero or u r s towards the safety concerns you were raising  h it's like a constant it's if it interferes with the progress of the design or the ability to construct it is it is it's very challenging day to go to work every day and say i can't support releasing that document i can't we need to go do these additional steps or we need additional x an analysis whatever it is in you know we produce thousands of documents on this project on any given month and my organization will review a large percentage of those so many of the concerns are either brought to me by my staff some some documents i review personally so it's really a mixture and you know when when when you're perceived as a person that says no i perceive i'm doing my job right that is my position if it's not adequate i'm there to say no they view that as that they don't they don't welcome the no answer very well what would be their response specifically to the concerns you're raising are they just saying that they can't do that or were they trying to get you to change your analysis they haven't actually asked to change the analysis in any way faint shape or form i think the difficulty was we didn't have adequate staff to actually prepare the analysis so there would be pressure to either release a document or they would release a document and not have it go through my organization for review right so then when i would find out about it right i'd get a call or question hey donna what's this about i would then go pull the document and issue comments on the document right so by that time the engineers they feel they've done the right thing that you know it's not i don't think they did anything on purpose you know right so they're just designers they didn't know they needed to incorporate in that requirement so when i would raise those you know i think it's a human reaction they don't like being told it's not good enough right so but we have to stop and pause and timeout and that's what we do but i'm all those occasions management in general  their media reaction is not to what do we have to do to resolve the concern it's what do we do to meet schedule what do we do to make sure we don't stop construction so it's always this incredible pressure to do something anything to continue the construction machine and my understanding is is that the bechtel and your on a project like this meeting the schedule is key towards them being able to make profit on the project absolutely there's actually project performance goals that what we have what we call a cost performance index and a schedule performance index in either one of those numbers fall within an acceptable range the department of energy will hold feet so department of energy and they actually drives them for performance that's not necessarily a bad thing but when that though that type of pressure from it whether it comes from the department or from either one of the contractors override safety or quality it's a bad thing right there is you don't get it there are some some types of nuclear accidents you don't get a do over and so were you part of the recent meeting in march with the in f s b your thoughts can you tell us  what that was about and what came of that the intent of that meeting was was twofold it was to follow up on the first public meeting that was in october of two thousand and ten to understand that the defense nuclear facility safety board has written several letters to the department of energy they've issued recommendations to the department of energy and what that means is the department of energy is really put on notice the secretary of energy is put on notice that any the issue in that particular letter is not acceptable in the now that recommendation goes to congress it goes to a lot of the appropriations committees because it's pretty serious the department must step in right and change a specific thing so whatever there is so there's two outstanding recommendations one is on the safety culture of the w t p and the other issue is on the mixing system the ability of like i said those technical issues how are we going to mix the tanks how we're going to process that so those are two open recommendations so the march twentieth meeting aired to give me the buzz of march twentieth march two thousand and twelve but it was about that time frame was to follow up on the mixing recommendation and the technical issues that we have on the project that was a session that i participated in in the second session was on the safety culture so the first session i felt was quite amicable right the both backed and then i was on the board i believe representing back on the project in nuclear safety you know they the their commitments to the defense nuclear facility safety board are really what the defense of nuclear facility safety board has been advocating for a while so that doesn't mean we resolve the technical issues that just means we've we've acknowledged that we have to address those technical issues so that was the first session the second session was focused on the i think the tougher issue right now at the way street men plant which is somewhat you know surrounded with me the initial recommendation from the sec from the defense nuclear facility safety board to the to the secretary of energy talked about the safety culture and the individual named in that letter as the unknowns one safety professional that that they had identified is actually me so that was part and parcel why i think i was a participant in that meeting and the defense board you know i won't say they protect me by any means but they are concerned and they're watching how nuclear safety is getting dressed and specifically how i'm getting treated on the project at some point in the meeting were they asking you about the what needed to be done on the project at this point multiple times i think the primary commitments that i was making in this meeting i was talking about the adequacy of the safety documents that are prepared by my organization that by the time i have gotten there they had degraded to such a state that i now and i use the word i have to re constitute that safety basis so i pretty much gave an overview of the plan that we've been working on to go in and reconstitute that safety basis for the pretreatment facility and there's other issues with the other three but they're not as significant as the p so when you say by the time you got there do you mean by the time you got to the project at hanford by the time i got to the public meeting so right so we we've identified it probably i think want to be back about in the january timeframe i said you know when you looked enough at the safety basis document and i'm trying to find the right controls we didn't have adequate analysis to make sure that we could actually support design so i said enough in pretty much told the department and the project we need to reconstitute the safety basis then what's the current estimate of how long that would i would say it's going to be upwards of two years and have to yours to get to the point where that the nuclear safe specialist can actually help us the collective us understand exactly how significant an accident can be or how big a spill could be how big a release could be and we will then take that information and then make sure that we're designing the right levels of protection into the design so two years from now during that same two years is the project on hold or is it moving forward it is currently on hold we are rebase lining for budget reasons not for the reconstitution reasons so construction has slowed way down design is continuing and in to some extent that's ok right because the design i have to have i have to have enough information about the design to say oh what happens with that pump or what happens with that valve so part of that is ok so but i suspect that over between now and i think august or september i'm working so i have staff working specifically to get all of those nuclear safety actions to reconstitute that into the new baseline for the project you mentioned mixing tags that's one of your concerns as well as on the project tom carpenter of hanford show and showed me some photos of what i believe was a test run for mixing tanks involved running them for forty eight hour period and it appeared that the amount of corrosion on yeah on that in the test that photos i saw was significant yes can you talk about a little bit of this so let's let's talk about the waste so the waste it's in those underground storage tanks is it has all of the process chemicals from whatever facility it came from and hampered it's got chunks of metal it's very abrasive ok it's calm like taken sandpaper in a liquid form so we're doing the mixing ok those mixing tests you're seeing we're actually forcing air through the through the waste right so that's the motive force that's how we do the mixing we did i say it's forcing air but it's really a suction mode thing but what happens is it's a very abrasive it's a constant hitting ick sandpaper blasting sandpaper on these metal vassals the nozzles the wear plates right and so it has the ability to a road in corrode now the reason don i would care about that is i have the vessels these these pulse jet mixers are inside of the big vessel which are inside of what we call a black cell once we seal that black cell up we can't go in there anymore so if we don't design the mixers and wear plates if they're needed to make sure that that doesn't erode and corrode and create those holes we won't have the ability to treat the waste in the underground storage tank will basically lose a huge part of our process so we need to make sure that that is very robust and we understand everything that's going on before we close up that black cell from that test did you find the fairly  surprising to see that much corrosion i was the previous documentation provided to my organization was oh it all we've done our roge and calculation are corrosion calculations and it will make it the full forty years  right so the engineers have done a calculation what the department of energy has has identified in one of their surveillances is there are significant technical inadequacies in the way we've done those calculations i'm not an erosion expert i'm not a corrosion expert what i need to make sure of in on my side of the problem is that we can confine that waste so that it never gets out so if you have erosion if you have a corrosion you can actually leak radioactive material or in the worst case you won't be able to process the radioactive material talk further about the defense nuclear facilities safety board meetings that you've had have any members of the department of energy been present at those meetings and what kind of interactions of they had during this meeting  t the defense nuclear facility safety board structures a public meeting they'll pick who they want to be a witness or a panelist so in the october timeframe of two thousand and ten i was on a panel with senior bechtel executives  l we executives from headquarters the ranking d o a official was dr tree a she was e m one so she was the highest ranking department of energy official overseeing the waste treatment plant so there's the qadri of folks that they actually want to drill down and ask questions and they start to make sure that the owner deal we right know is you know making sure they understand the department's position then they go to the prime contractor which in that case was backed  they had specialists up there from p the the northwest national laboratory and then they had folks like me that have a specific job on the project so the meeting was i think a little bit in that timeframe that meeting was very  can contentious the defense nuclear facility safety board was not not not satisfied with the responses they were getting to some very technical questions one of the defining moments was a discussion on deposition velocity where the environmental management individual doctor three a was not really answering their questions so the chairman winokur was getting very very very frustrated she wasn't answering the question the the floor was then turned over to a question to me by joe bader and he asked me this i considered the straight man question you know done are you comfortable using a technically inadequate answer the number in your communicated my concerns on the an adequate model that was being developed the complexity of how we would have to operate the plant so that was a pretty much a fourteen hour day and then after we closed for the day in walking been i tried to leave the leave the tension and make a joke i have a tendency to be a jokester and i said you know i think he's returning my christmas card i may have made him mad and she said well if your intention was to make people mad you made everybody m so i at that point because she is the highest ranking do we official in the room right she's the ultimate customer and is a been a long day i chose to leave so subsequent to that there has been closed hearing from the defense board which we really can't talk about and and the tension on the project specifically towards me has continued to accelerate and then the defense board issued as a result of some of those tensions a safety culture memoranda recommendation to the secretary of energy and some of those examples are actually cited in their recommendations so do you believe it was at that meeting where the level of tension was ratcheted up significantly i believe it was a pivot point right so up until that point i had you know i had to been trying to solve the problems on the project and then taking you know trying to work and solve it in a public forum when you testify i took a definitive position right so i've actually testified now to the the board that oversaw oversees the department of energy and my position had changed the year before and it hasn't changed a year and a half after i mean i'm still committed to my technical position and remind me again is it an advisory board the d n b or the advisory or do they have the power to actually implement changes with the department of energy they they do oversight of the department of energy they're not advisory board so they will issue questions comments and when those are not resolved to that oversight agency i look at them as an oversight board they have authority they can then go to congress with their concerns right because that to fund the department of energy so they really are the only thing we have out there right now that are adequately doing oversight of the department of energy and where they created by congress yes i believe they were by the so where are we at now then i mean you had this recent meeting in march with and you continue to work out at hanford on yes it's a challenging day every day i go to work i have a job to do i won't say it's the most pleasant environment and in most cases i feel that i'm either being in completely left out of the loop or isolated right so they don't they don't want to ask donna the question because they don't like donna's answer to you know just just downright  refusal to address a problem so if we are in a meeting right it's like we're not even going to have a real discussion so it's pretty frustrating so but at the end of the day i've got a job to do so i review the documents and make sure my staff understands my expectations write i issue form comments when i need to and absolutely committed to making sure that the plan gets designed correctly and does the public have access to reports and or comments that you make  i don't you know they're not they're not classified in any way shape fashion or form i'm sure they can probably request them right through the proper foyer channels so it is done at the behest of the department of energy they can absolutely get copies of all of the safety documents that we write that my organization will coordinate in the dangerous ways from it those are actually in the department of energy public reading room but it sounds like it kind of falls on citizen grassroots groups like let's say that i have the advice i need that the message is getting out because it's you know myself there's a few there's there's quite a few other high profile folks also that are working very hard to do the right thing but when you're up against two big corporations it's very hard to get the message out so we rely on hand for challenge to support us right in sometimes it's just a phone call for support it's not they don't do anything but sometimes you just need to talk something through because it's been a challenging or difficult day and they're  steadfast in their commitment to making sure hanford is done right and i think that their their overall commitment to making sure we get the waste out of the tanks right is the things that we need to keep up the pressure so we need the vitrification process we have to get the waste out of those tanks current projection is the waste will by the time if we solve all the problems listen magic happens in the next year and a half the tanks will be a hundred years old by the time we get the waste process it's a much safer