The head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office fears remediation within the weapons complex has reached a “plateau” and needs a push to advance toward closure of many 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 mine is losing weight,” Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said Tuesday during the keynote speech at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Henderson, Nev. “It comes off quick in the beginning and then you hit a plateau.”
“[Environmental Management], over the coming months, will be developing an enterprise-wide EM strategic plan supported by a set of consistent, site-specific 10-year strategic plans focused on completion and closure,” White said. The planning will be done jointly by headquarters, sites in the weapons complex, contractors, and other stakeholders, she added.
The office, which has an annual budget of roughly $7 billion for cleanup of 16 facilities around the country, 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 cleanup of the Central Plateau, are also due to expire in coming years.
The Office of Environmental Management is already trying to revamp ongoing procurements to adopt a more “end state” philosophy, White said. “We need to think about how to reinvigorate the completion mindset that used to exist in our program.”
Superior performance by contractors will be repaid with generous fees, she said. In turn, they will be called on to deal with issues in an expedited fashion to avoid “cost and schedule surprises.”
Following her presentation, White told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing her office will soon post a job opening for position of the principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management (EM-2). Jim Owendoff, a longtime DOE veteran, recently left the job to become a special adviser on nuclear cleanup issues at the Savannah River Site. Mark Gilbertson, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for EM’s Office of Regulatory and Policy Affairs, is filling the EM-2 slot on an acting basis.
