PHOENIX – The Department of Energy’s $8-billion Office of Environmental Management will soon change its name, DOE Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Tim Walsh told the 52nd annual Waste Management Symposia here Monday morning.
The new name will be something along the lines of the Office of Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization, Walsh said at the plenary session.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) was created in 1989 to clean up contamination at Cold War and Manhattan Project sites stemming from decades of nuclear weapons production.
Talk of a name change had been rumored for a few weeks but the news created quite a stir among the roughly 2,800 participants in the annual Waste Management gathering. Hallway and reception conversations speculated how DOE will handle the logistics of changing everything from the website to a wide array of official documents.
Walsh did not say when the name change will take place. The head of, what is now the nuclear cleanup office, was not made available to Exchange Monitor during the conference as his staff cited a packed schedule during the conference.
The government loves acronyms, Walsh said during his speech, adding his new acronym will be GSD, for “getting stuff done.” He quipped that some might have their own variation of that saying.
Walsh again cited DOE’s plans for “energy dominance parks” and federal nuclear installations. These parks will eventually include advanced nuclear power, such as small reactors, to provide electricity for artificial intelligence data centers.
At the same time, Walsh said nuclear cleanup will not be forgotten but the goal will be to actually speed up remediation timelines in order to achieve major advances by 2040.
Walsh said Environmental Management will be undergoing a reorganization in coming weeks. As part of the process the office will be hiring about 90 to 100 employees, he added.
Longenecker & Associates CEO John Longenecker, who spoke after Walsh, picked up on the theme, saying EM’s ultimate goal is reuse of the land once used for Cold War and Manhattan Project era nuclear work.
During a subsequent panel discussion Monday, EM field office managers stressed that cleanup will not be driven to the backburner by power projects.
Dutch Conrad, president of Mission Conversion Services Alliance kicked off the afternoon session by asking how Environmental Management can reassure stakeholders that cleanup is not taking a back seat.
“I’m the cleanup guy,” DOE Hanford Field Office Site manager Ray Geimer said during an afternoon session at the Waste Management Symposia. Nuclear cleanup remains job No. 1 at Hanford, Geimer said.
Other Environmental Management site managers offered similar assurances.
The public should be pointed to many old contaminated facilities that have been taken down, said Erik Olds, DOE’s manager of the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and acting head of the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office.
There is no longer a contaminated old gasification diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, while the Portsmouth Site in Ohio has taken down the X-326 process plant, Olds said.
Environmental Management can assure public confidence in cleanup by delivering results, said Edwin DeShong, EM’s field office manager at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Savannah River has already added solar energy panels and is working on nuclear power and data centers. Most of the land at the 310-square mile site is still available for development, he said.
Likewise, Olds said that sites such as Oak Ridge, Paducah and Portsmouth all have lots of available land.
Various site managers also said that Walsh is pushing Environmental Management to get many top cleanup projects done by 2040.
“On most of our sites we are the biggest employer,” in the community, said Joel Bradburne, the No.2 Environmental Management executive. “These places were not picked because they were a thriving community.” “The worst thing you can do is turn something over that you have to take back,” due to insufficient cleanup.