Tim Griffin, executive director of the Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association for nearly five years, has left to take another job.

Griffin’s last day was May 8 at the trade group that represents about 170 firms and individuals doing business with the Energy Department or its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

A geologist by training, Griffin spent more than 21 years with the engineering and environmental firm Golder Associates before becoming ETEBA’s executive director in 2015. He has already started his new post as a program coordinator at Hagerty Consulting, an Illinois-based emergency management consulting firm established in 2001 to help clients prepare for and bounce back from disasters.

Griffin, who has a home in Chapel Hill, N.C., spent most of his time living in an apartment at Oak Ridge while with ETEBA. The Hagerty opportunity came about very quickly after the emergency management firm landed a contract in North Carolina, Griffin said Wednesday by phone.

The firm and Griffin will work with North Carolina Emergency Management to support ongoing recovery from hurricanes over the past four years.

“We are excited for Tim with his new opportunity back in his home state of North Carolina,” ETEBA Board President Bob Eby siad in an email. “And while we sincerely will miss Tim’s leadership and wish him only the best in his new position.” The board will review a job description for executive director next week although it could be late June before an advertisement is placed, he added.

The president-elect of the ETEBA board, Lauren Amos, will act as executive director in the short term, Eby said.

A previously scheduled June 23 ETEBA forum on federal business opportunities, planned in Albuquerque, N.M., is going forward as a virtual event, Griffin said.

Stakeholders now have until June 29 to comment on Energy Department plans to use grout to stabilize three underground waste structures at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

The original deadline for comments was April 24, which was later extended until May 22, then pushed back again, according to a recent notice from DOE.

The three retired structures are located within the footprint of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. All are contaminated with plutonium and at risk of failure. They would be filled with concrete-like grout eliminate the risk of collapse.

In April, Jacobs subsidiary CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation awarded a $3.9 million subcontract to engineering firm White Shield, of Pasco, Wash., to design and apply engineered grout at the facilities.

The at-risk structures are:

• The 216-Z-2 Crib, basically a large wooden box previously used for plutonium-contaminated waste from PFP, which DOE wants to stabilize this summer;
• The 241-Z-361 Settling Tank, a concrete facility with a steel liner that was also used for PFP waste, which would be shored up second; and,
• The 216 Z-9 Crib, which has a concrete cover and steel columns for contaminated waste. Stabilization would be done this fall and winter.

Hanford managers want to avoid another situation similar to the partial collapse in May 2017 of waste-storage Tunnel 1 at Hanford’s Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant. In February, the Government Accountability Office said DOE should do a better job monitoring old facilities.

While the projects do not constitute emergency work, they are time sensitive and should not be put off too long, the Energy Department has said. A virtual meeting on the proposed plans was held May 7.

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