Walter Tamosaitis v. Urs Inc.

The Energy Reorganization Act (“ERA”), 42 U.S.C. § 5851 (b)(4), includes an “opt-out” provision empowering whist-leblowing employees working at nuclear energy sites to bring anti-retaliation claims to federal court after one year of agency inaction. Our case concerns the interpre tation and application of that provision. In addition, we consider whether a whistle-blower who sues an employer in a federal anti-retaliation lawsuit under the ERA opt-out provision has a constitutional right to a jury trial.

I.

A. Background

The Hanford Nuclear Site is a former nuclear weapons production facility in Washington state. Hanford’s reactors produced plutonium for the national defense for over forty years. The Hanford site abuts a river and stores fifty-three million gallons of hazardous, high-level nuclear waste in underground tanks. There are estimates that one million gallons of nuclear waste have leaked from the storage tanks into the ground and that the groundwater beneath eighty-five square miles of the site is polluted.

The Department of Energy (“DOE”) leads the effort to clean up the pollution at Hanford. The clean-up plan includes construction and management of a Waste…