The company handling the bulk of the cleanup at the massive Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington State celebrated when it received more than $1 billion of Obama stimulus funds in 2009. Dee Millikin, communications officer for the CH2M Hill industrial engineering company, recalls that the company held a "job fair"? after receiving the money and hired almost 1,300 workers.
It signed up radiation technicians, demolition crews, heavy equipment operators, engineers, and business professionals, among others. And ancillary hiring by other companies that produce equipment used in the nuclear waste cleanup upped the total of new jobs to about 4,000, according to local union officials. But once the money finally ran out last week, "those jobs ended up going away,"? Milliken says. The company recently held another job fair "“ but that was to try to place their soon-to-be-laid-off employees. Whether those workers found another job is unknown, because no government organization tracks that information.
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