A ruling last month by U.S. District Judge Bruce S. Jenkins gave the years-old whistle-blower claim new life.

Jenkins agreed to let Jolene Lemmon, the widow of Roger Lemmon, a one-time night foreman at the EnergySolutions Inc. landfill in Tooele County, remain involved in the case.

The judge also refused the company's request to dismiss the third version of the complaint. The case was originally filed by Lemmon, Patrick Cole and Kyle Gunderson in 2003.

The trio's attorneys are expected to hold a news conference today to discuss the latest version of the False Claims Acts lawsuit. But EnergySolutions, which inherited the case from Envirocare of Utah, had little to say about it.

"This case has been dismissed three times already," said EnergySolutions spokesman John Ward. "We haven't seen the latest attempt, so we'll just have to wait and see what it says this time."

Steve Russell, an attorney for the whistle-blowers, said the case is important because the federal government is a big customer at the site, where more than 90 percent of the nation's low-level radioactive waste goes. Government agencies paid hundreds of millions of dollars to have the Utah site dispose of waste safely and permanently but the company routinely failed to fulfill its obligations properly, he said.

"They [at the company] are getting full payment," Russell said, "but they are not providing the services they are obligated to provide contractually."

In logs Lemmon kept during his two years on the job at Envirocare, the 45-year-old father of three boys noted more than 60 times when the company allegedly buried waste improperly, failed to clean up spills properly and failed to report these and other mistakes, as the company's federal contracts required.

The trio secretly took the case to the federal government in 2002 under the Civil War-era law. Lawyers for the Army, Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency - which rely on the Tooele site for disposal of waste from low-level radioactive cleanups - declined to take up the case.

That left the whistle-blowers and their private attorneys free to press forward. But Lemmon, who lost his job at Envirocare after an on-the-job injury, died at age 45 a few months after the suit was filed.

More than 5,800 whistle-blower cases have been brought since the False Claims Act was updated under President Reagan in 1986, according to the Web site for Taxpayers Against Fraud. About $20 billion has been recovered for the federal government, and the whistle-blowers have shared $2 billion of that.

Enacted when Abraham Lincoln was president, the law targeted suppliers who were defrauding the Union by selling crates filled with sawdust instead of muskets and billing two or three times for the same horses, the Web site says.

fahys@sltrib.com

* The case was originally filed by Roger Lemmon, Patrick Cole and Kyle Gunderson in 2003.

* A ruling last month by U.S. District Judge Bruce S. Jenkins revived the years-old whistle-blower claim.

* Jolene Lemmon, the widow of Roger Lemmon, a one-time night foreman at the EnergySolutions Inc. landfill in Tooele County, will remain involved in the case.