Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:
Stephens said that he doesn't pay much attention to politics, but he does know the regular budgeting process has been dysfunctional during the years of Barack Obama's presidency and that sequestration is a symptom of that dysfunction. The cuts kicked in last month and forced the federal government to find $85 billion worth of savings this year. Now Stephens is out of a job.
Stephens, a 32-year-old father of two who lives in Richland, Wash., spent several years as a radiological control technician for one of several companies tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy with cleaning up nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The biggest challenge at the site is dealing with 53 million gallons of nuclear sludge stored in leaky underground tanks.
Of the 9,000 workers at the site, more than 200 members of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council like Stephens received layoff notices last month, and more than 2,000 non-union workers will have to take unpaid days off this year.
It holds two thirds of the nuclear waste in the United States, or did until it started leaking (378 million liters so far, a record, and less than 10 kilometers from the Columbia River, which is uncontaminated as yet). My maternal grandparents both worked here in the Manhattan Project, as it happened, and there is some family romance connected with it, because they had been divorced (from each other) for a long time, and now remarried, shortly before my grandfather's death. The Department of Energy promises that the layoffs will not cause any risk to the workforce or to the general public. Oh, good.
