As the Department of Energy finalizes a plan for transition management of Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Office of Environmental Management, it has not decided whether that plan will be publicly released, EM Acting Assistant Secretary Mark Whitney said yesterday. “I don’t know if it’s going to be released publicly. What I can tell you is that a lot of work has been done by this team that has been working on this,” Whitney said at the ETEBA Business Opportunities Conference in Knoxville, Tenn. “We have developed a good process for moving forward. What I know that we need to do moving forward is make sure we communicate with folks. That means folks in the community, folks in the contractor community, our Congressional representatives and delegations. I don’t know if that means releasing the plan publicly.”
Currently cleanup work at Los Alamos is managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos Field Office but funded by EM. However, after pressure from New Mexico for the change, in late September DOE established working groups to develop a plan for the transition of legacy cleanup work to contracts managed by EM. That plan was due to DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz on Nov. 14.
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