In the final week of the Obama administration, the Treasury Department made unannounced payments totaling $375 million to Dow Chemical and Boeing to reimburse the two Department of Energy (DOE) contractors for judgments awarded in the 2016 settlement of a lawsuit dating all the way back to 1990. A DOE official who declined to be named confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the payments had been made and that “[t]his contract action arose out of a statutory obligation imposed by the Price-Anderson Act (as amended) to indemnify certain Department of Energy contractors for particular legal liabilities.”
The Denver Post reported the original lawsuit settlement in May 2016 between the two companies and thousands of homeowners in Colorado who lived near the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility. The FBI raided the plant in 1989, and later Rockwell International (purchased by Boeing in 1996) paid millions in fines for Clean Water Act violations. In the lawsuit, homeowners claimed property values were adversely affected by plutonium contamination from the plant.
