PHOENIX — The top cleanup officers from the Department of Energy and other U.S. and international nuclear agencies are on hand here this week for the annual Waste Management Symposia conference.
Monday’s morning plenary will begin with comments by William (Ike) White, DOE’s senior adviser for the Office of Environmental Management. He will join other headliners, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and William Magwood, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who now heads the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency.
Jeff Avery, the No. 2 boss at DOE Environmental Management, will be featured in Monday morning discussion of issues affecting remediation at Cold War and Manhattan Project sites. Avery will be joined by a trio of top managers at the cleanup office: Greg Sosson, Kristen Ellis and Dae Chung, responsible for field operations, policy and corporate services, respectively.
The conference organizers have posted a full schedule of the week’s program on its website. The meeting runs through Thursday.
During the week there will also be sessions on nuclear properties ranging from the Hanford Site in Washington state to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, among others. There will be multiple sessions on procurement as well as workforce development.
Transuranic waste disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and DOE’s quest for communities willing to host interim storage for high-level radioactive waste will also be featured.
Meanwhile, Paul Murray, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, will be on hand to discuss the agency’s latest attempt at creating a consent-based siting process for spent nuclear fuel from civilian power plants.
Other conference topics this week will be development of small modular reactors and advanced nuclear projects going through the pipeline at DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A DOE initiative to utilize unused land at nuclear sites for carbon-free energy will also be discussed.
