HENDERSON, Nev. — The head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office fears remediation efforts have reached a “plateau” and need a push to advance toward closure of remaining sites. Toward that, the office is developing strategic plans both for its full operations and for specific properties over the coming decade.

“The analogy that comes to mind is losing weight,” Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said Tuesday during the keynote speech at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit. “It comes off quick in the beginning and then you hit a plateau.”

Established in 1989, the Office of Environmental Management has completed remediation of more than 90 DOE properties around the nation, including the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. Only 16 cleanup projects remain, but they encompass some of the largest and most technically challenging jobs that will require decades and tens of billions of dollars to complete.

White is trying to get the focus back squarely on “completion and closure,” through development of an enterprise-wide strategic plan. The process will result in site-specific 10-year strategic plans, the EM-1 said in a post-speech interview with Weapons Complex Monitor.

While not delving deep into details, White did make it clear stressing site completion, and reducing DOE’s nuclear cleanup liability, was a key reason she wanted to become assistant secretary. “I’ve been in the program for a long time” as an environmental contractor, she said, adding she feels self-imposed pressure to take advantage of the current funding levels.

“I really wanted to put my shoulder into it” and get some things done, White said. As a result, the Office of Environmental Management is asking officials at its cleanup sites how close they could get to closure within 10 years if they had an unlimited budget.

The Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) near Schenectady, N.Y., is already virtually at completion, White noted. A two-year demolition project at the site located at located at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory was finished earlier this year for two remaining buildings once used to advance chemical separation for plutonium. Both DOE and contractor AECOM have said the project should be finished this year.

The end could also be visible at some other locations, such as the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state and the Energy Technology Engineering Center at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California, White said after her presentation.

Once home to a commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant, West Valley covers about 200 acres of the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. The first phase of decommissioning, which includes demolition of most above-ground structures, should be finished by 2030.

After tearing down a number of structures years ago, DOE is awaiting final completion plans for the entire Santa Susana site to be issued by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). The DOE ETEC facility is located on 90 acres within the entire 2,800-acre property.

With an annual budget of roughly $7 billion, Environmental Management has billions of dollars’ worth of contracts approaching “that will shape our work for decades,” White said. For example: DOE is in the early stages of picking the next management and operations contractor at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. A number of major contracts at the Hanford Site in Washington state, including tank waste management and remediation of the Central Plateau, are also due to expire in coming years.

The cleanup office is trying to revamp ongoing procurements to adopt a more “end state” philosophy, which focuses more on final completion, White said. Contractors are being asked how their approach will reduce environmental liability and bring sites closer to closure. “We need to think about how to reinvigorate the completion mindset that used to exist in our program,” she said.

Superior performance by contractors will be repaid with generous fees, according to White. In turn, they will be called on to deal with issues in an expedited fashion to avoid “cost and schedule surprises.”

DOE Considers Potential Future Use of Idaho Treatment Plant

Separately, the cleanup office is finalizing a study into the economic viability of continued use of the Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) should it be allowed to process radioactive waste from out of state.

“I like to make these decisions based on good data and facts. To that end, we actually have a very detailed financial study going on right now,” White said.

The evaluation is considering the cost of keeping AMWTP open to process out-of-state waste, compared to building similar facilities in one or more other states. The study is looking at “financial realities” and “what the waste streams might be,” White said.

“We are in the process of trying to finalize that study,” she said. “We haven’t made a decision there yet.” When asked when the study might be made public, she replied “soon.”

The AMWTP was built as a result of the 1995 legal settlement agreement to treat 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic and low-level waste at Idaho. That mission, which began in 2003, is expected to conclude around the end of 2018.

Most of the waste was shipped to Idaho decades ago from the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado where the federal government had built plutonium triggers for the country’s nuclear arsenal. Once processed, the waste can be shipped to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

The Idaho Cleanup Project Citizens Advisory Board voted 7-4 in late June to urge DOE to extend the facility’s lifespan. But there has also been opposition in Idaho to importing other states’ waste The dissenting members of the citizens panel said there was not enough detail on how the life extension of AMWTP would be handled, and not enough emphasis on protecting the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.

“There are parties on each side of that discussion,” White acknowledged. “Obviously we have got to work with stakeholders.”

The 1995 legal settlement, involving Idaho, DOE, and the U.S. Navy, currently stipulates any nuclear waste imported into Idaho must remain in the state no longer than 12 months, which could complicate continued use of AMWTP.