PHOENIX — David Brunnert, the new chief operating officer at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, will focus much of his attention on the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Waste Management Symposia heard here Monday.
“He and I served in the first Gulf War together,” the head of Environmental Management (EM) Tim Walsh, said during a mid-morning panel discussion. “He was one of my platoon leaders,” Walsh said.
Brunnert, who said he was happy to be working again for “a smart commander,” said he started visiting a number of EM sites including Hanford.
“I quickly realized and I think this is true for any organization,” Brunnert said, “you tend to get stagnant. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way to anybody … but over time there just becomes this routine of doing the business without really focusing on what the end objective is.” Staff can become too focused on incremental goals, he added.
During a Tuesday panel discussion, Hanford Site Manager Ray Geimer said within the past year or so there has been a positive shift in momentum as the site starts turning liquid waste into a solid glass.
Brunnert seeks to “energize” Hanford and other sites to work hard and “do as much as can possibly be done at these sites in the next 24 years.”
“I was impressed with everybody’s ‘want to,’” Brunnert said. Budget and equipment are important but the “want to” is vital to accomplishing big projects, he added.
Hanford, which produced plutonium for bomb making for decades, has been left with 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste held in underground tanks. The newly-commissioned Direct Feed Low-Activity-Waste Facilities at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant were only designed to handle perhaps a third of the less radioactive tank waste, Walsh said.