PHOENIX— The Department of Energy’s $7.6 billion Office of Environmental Management is now responsible for only 15 cleanup sites, with the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York coming off the board.
Meanwhile, DOE Environmental Management planned to sign a new collaboration agreement with the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority later today (Monday) at the 2022 Waste Management Symposia. Those are a couple of key developments from day 1 of the gathering.
“Today we are down to 15 sites,” Environmental Management chief of staff Mike Nartker said during a panel discussion, formally removing Brookhaven from the remediation list. Brookhaven is done roughly a year after crews tore down the High Flux Beam Reactor exhaust stack.
Both William (Ike) White, the senior adviser and top day-to-day boss at Environmental Management and UK National Decommissioning Authority CEO David David Peattie, touted the new collaboration deal between the agencies during the kickoff session for the conference that is resuming in person this year after going virtual in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A three-way agreement between the DOE, UK and Canada was inked at the last in-person Waste Management Symposia in 2020.
The cooperative two-way statement of intent on information sharing between DOE and the UK dates to 2007 and is renewed every five years.
During the morning, attendees also heard recorded messages from Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Kayla Barron, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut currently in the international space station.
