A little more than a year after Tim Walsh became the Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management (EM) the $8-billion office has reached key milestones in both nuclear cleanup and laying groundwork for future nuclear power, DOE said last week.
Walsh was confirmed by the Senate on Oct. 7, 2025, the DOE Environmental Management office said in an Oct. 20 news release. He was sworn in shortly thereafter and became the first Senate-confirmed head of the nuclear program since Anne Marie White in the first Donald Trump administration.
Since Walsh joined EM, the office has hit several milestones in its traditional role of remediating Cold War and Manhattan Project sites, EM said in the press release. For example:
Workers at the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., solidified the first radioactive tank waste into glass form at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).
The DOE cleanup contractor at the Idaho National Laboratory has solidified more than 400,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste into a granular form using the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit.
At the Moab site in Utah crews have extracted all 17 million tons of uranium tailings from a site near the Colorado River to an engineered landfill more than 30 miles away.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Management office has helped lay the groundwork for reindustrialization of old cleanup sites at locations such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Paducah in Kentucky and Portsmouth in Ohio, the news release said.
