The Environmental Protection Agency has not made a permanent plan for management of its office at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state. Instead, the EPA on Monday assigned two staffers at its Hanford Project Office to fill in as acting manager over the next eight months.
The move came after Dennis Faulk, who had been an outspoken leader of the office for more than eight years, took early retirement from the federal government at the end of August.
The Environmental Protection Agency is a Hanford regulator and one of the organizations that sets milestones for cleanup of the sprawling former plutonium production site under the Tri-Party Agreement. The Hanford office also oversees DOE’s Idaho nuclear cleanup project.
For the upcoming 120 days, Laura Buelow, an environmental scientist with the EPA Hanford office, will serve as acting manager. Then environmental engineer Dave Einan will take over for the same period of time.
Alex Smith, the Nuclear Waste Program manager for the Washington state Department of Ecology, sent Faulk a letter calling him “balanced and knowledgeable, a go-to for Hanford expertise and insight.” She said his “wise counsel” and “straightforward, always honest answers to even the most difficult questions” would be missed.
Smith credited Faulk with laying the groundwork for the signing of the record of decision that led to the creation of the 200 West Pump and Treat System, which is removing multiple contaminants from groundwater at central Hanford. He also successfully opposed DOE’s plan to cap waste burial sites along the Columbia River rather than digging up the waste. “You argued successfully that the long-term costs would be just as much as or more than digging them up,” Smith wrote. He was proven correct when hundreds of pieces of lost, irradiated fuel pieces were dug up in the burial grounds, she said.
In a telephone interview, Faulk said one of the highlights of his 32 years at Hanford, including 26 with EPA, was helping to establish the community Hanford Advisory Board. “Who would have thought they would have been such a force in Hanford cleanup,” he said. The board has influenced EPA and the state, serving as a gauge of public opinion on Hanford cleanup issues, Faulk added.
