Scott Anderson has been promoted to president and general manager of the cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley.
Anderson has been the No. 2 executive at the West Valley contractor for three years, serving as senior vice president and general manager. He succeeds Jeff Bradford, who recently became program manager at Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership, a contractor led by CH2M parent Jacobs Engineering, which is in charge of deactivation and remediation efforts at DOE’s Paducah Site in Kentucky.
At West Valley, Anderson has helped oversee placement of 278 canisters of high-level waste onto an on-site storage pad ahead of schedule, demolition of 22 of 47 buildings, and deactivation of the West Valley Vitrification Facility. Anderson said in an August presentation the vit plant demolition should be completed this month.
The CH2M-led contractor has a 10-year, $542 million contract at West Valley that runs through March 2020.
Anderson has over 30 years of experience in management of radioactive and hazardous waste. He has held management jobs at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and the Idaho Cleanup Project, CH2M said in a Sept. 4 press release. In Tennessee, Anderson was in charge of waste disposition for remediation prime URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), according to his LinkedIn profile.
The West Valley Demonstration Project covers roughly 200 acres of the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. Between 1966 to 1972, Nuclear Fuel Services ran a commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at the site. The DOE is responsible for decontamination and decommissioning of structures at the site.
Former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman died Sept. 7, news outlets reported. He was 79.
Bodman led the Department of Energy from 2005 to 2009 during George W. Bush’s second term in office. During his tenure, Bodman fired Linton Brooks — the second full-time administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration — following security lapses at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Under Bodman’s leadership, the Department of Energy in 2008 filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
The Washington Post, citing a statement from Bush, said Bodman died of primary progressive aphasia, a neurological disorder.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated chemical engineer and business executive was also Bush’s deputy treasury secretary and deputy commerce secretary, prior to joining the Department of Energy.
A federal judge has pushed out the date of the bench trial in the Hanford Site chemical vapors lawsuit until September 2019, about four years after the case was filed.
Judge Thomas Rice, of U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington state, on Thursday granted a joint request from parties to the case to reschedule the trial – for an 11th time. That will allow for a continuation of talks that began in late 2016 to reach a settlement in the case.
Under the new case schedule, the next deadline is Oct. 9 for plaintiffs to identify their experts. The trial at the Richland, Wash., federal courthouse has been delayed about 10 weeks to Sept. 9, 2019. It had originally been set for May 22, 2017.
Washington state, the watchdog group Hanford Challenge, and the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598 sued the Department of Energy and its Hanford tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, in September 2015. They are demanding better protection from chemical vapors for the workers at the site’s storage tank farms, saying inhaling chemicals associated with radioactive tank waste has caused serious illnesses.
Hanford stores 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste, the byproduct of the site’s history of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Most of the delays in the case have been at the request of both plaintiffs and defendants after Rice ruled in November 2016 that current worker protections at the Hanford tank farms, such as supplied air respirators, and other improvements adequately protect workers until trial. But he also said “the court does not deny that vapor exposures have occurred or that employees have experienced serious vapor-related illnesses.”
A wildfire burned an estimated 3,000 acres of the Hanford Site in Washington state early Saturday morning.
Mission Support Alliance, the Department of Energy contractor in charge of the Hanford Fire Department, said the blaze was discovered at 3:20 a.m. and was contained at 6:50 a.m.
The fire burned across grass and brush in the southwest portion of the production area at Hanford, reaching no buildings or waste sites, according to Mission Support Alliance. Most of the remaining waste sites and buildings are in in central Hanford.
The cause of the fire was not released over last weekend, but a lightning storm passed through Eastern Washington on Sept. 7.
Highway 240, a public highway between the production area and original security zone at the western side of Hanford, was closed for several hours early Saturday morning. Workers were told to avoid the Yakima Barricade entrance to Hanford on Highway 240 and to instead use the Wye Barricade just north of the Tri-Cities.
