A longtime worker at the Hanford Site in Washington state on Sunday officially became chief engineer for the Office of River Protection, the Department of Energy said.
Elaine Diaz “will serve as principal technical expert for the development and implementation of engineering standard requirements and provides recommendations to senior management on nuclear safety and authorization basis guidance and policy criteria,” according to a DOE announcement. “She will also collaborate with multi-agency committees, panels and regulatory entities to exchange technical information pertaining to engineering and nuclear safety issues, policies and guidelines; and represents ORP as a technical expert as required – among myriad other technically related duties.”
Diaz has worked since 2007 with the DOE office overseeing construction of the Waste Treatment Plant and remediation and ultimate closure of the tank farms at Hanford, among other programs. She worked as a safety systems oversight engineer for the WTP project confinement ventilation and process gas treatment systems, and before that as a confinement ventilation cognizant system engineer, a system design engineer, and an engineering team lead for nuclear facilities at Hanford. Diaz received the DOE Safety Systems Oversight Annual Award in 2011.
Meanwhile, Washington state is continuing to accept applications for its nuclear waste program manager, a position that “is responsible for administering and managing the state and delegated federal programs to manage environmental cleanup of the Hanford Site and management of mixed hazardous and low level radioactive waste in the state of Washington. This includes implementing hazardous waste management, clean up, clean water and clean air regulations at the Hanford site and at sites that manage low level radioactive waste on and adjacent to the Hanford site and at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard,” according to the job notice. Jane Hedges, who has held the position for nearly a decade, is scheduled to retire in February. More details, and the application portal, can be found
here.
