Seven more former employees join N3B retaliation lawsuit
Seven former N3B workers have now joined a retaliation case tied to Los Alamos cleanup work, raising fresh questions about reporting, safety and federal oversight.
Seven more former employees have joined a federal retaliation case that is now probing how Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos handled workplace reporting inside the Los Alamos cleanup contract, widening a dispute that reaches beyond labor claims into taxpayer-funded oversight of the lab’s legacy waste mission.
The expanded complaint was filed May 6 in U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. It adds seven plaintiffs to the case first brought Jan. 20 by Tashia Owens, N3B’s former chief of staff and human resources director, and Edward Martinez, a senior radiation control technician. The amended filing names Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, LLC, known as N3B, along with HII Nuclear and BWXT Technical Services Group.
The case is built around claims under the federal False Claims Act retaliation provision, Section 1985(2) witness deterrence, negligence per se, wrongful or retaliatory discharge and punitive damages. In practical terms, the filing argues that the dispute is not just about personnel decisions but about whether workers were punished for raising concerns or reporting problems in a federally funded cleanup environment. That matters in Los Alamos County because N3B manages the 10-year, $2.1 billion Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, and DOE lists the company as the legacy cleanup contractor at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
That cleanup mission covers legacy transuranic, mixed low-level and low-level waste, demolition of excess facilities, soil and water remediation, groundwater work and environmental monitoring. The contract began April 30, 2018, and DOE later extended the work through April 29, 2028. N3B was originally awarded the contract in December 2017, in a deal reported at about $1.39 billion over 10 years.
The retaliation case lands against a backdrop of earlier federal scrutiny. In December 2023, DOE issued a Preliminary Notice of Violation over a Sept. 8, 2022 heat exhaustion incident at LANL in which a worker lost consciousness while operating an excavator in anti-contamination clothing and a powered air purifying respirator, with no air conditioning in the cab and no rest or hydration breaks for about four and a half hours. DOE cited two Severity Level I and two Severity Level II violations and imposed a $130,000 contract fee reduction.
DOE later recognized N3B in 2025 for occurrence reporting, and said the contractor earned more than $13.5 million, or 79% of the available fee, in fiscal 2024. N3B declined to comment this week, leaving the court filing as the main public window into the widening dispute. For residents watching the cleanup effort from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, the key issue is whether the contractor charged with cleaning up the lab’s legacy hazards is also maintaining the reporting, safety and compliance systems the work requires.
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