PHOENIX — Christine Gelles, the Energy Department’s acting associate deputy assistant secretary for waste management, will retire from DOE on March 18 to join consulting and marketing shop Longenecker & Associates.
“I will see you next time with just a different name tag, I hope,” Gelles, a 22-year DOE veteran three steps removed in the chain of command from the assistant energy secretary for environmental management, said during a contractor round table here during the 2016 Waste Management Conference.
“She’s not dying, she’s just leaving,” an emotional Renee Echols, senior vice president, of sales, marketing, and business development at Perma-Fix Environmental Services, said Thursday as she introduced Gelles to kick off the session.
Waste Management is one of three so-called mission units created last year at DOE headquarters in Washington whose heads report to acting Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Frank Marcinowski. The Waste Management unit provides technical and policy advice for cleanup operations across the DOE weapons complex. The unit also writes the rules for packaging and shipping radioactive waste from cleanup sites.
It was not immediately clear what Gelles’ title or role would be at Las Vegas-based Longenecker, nor was it clear who would succeed her at DOE.
North Wind Starts Construction at Idaho Under Letter Contract
North Wind Services of Idaho Falls will start building the Accelerated Retrieval Project (ARP) IX enclosure at the Energy Department’s Idaho Site under a one-year, $1.7 million letter contract DOE announced in a Tuesday press release.
ARP is a program to build enclosures over buried waste at Pit 10 East in the subsurface disposal area of the radioactive waste management complex at the Idaho National Laboratory. The pit, roughly 0.7 acre in area, contains buried transuranic waste DOE plans to exhume by the early 2020s. ARP exhumation began earlier this decade. The entire project covers just over 5.5 acres at the site.
It was not immediately clear why North Wind would perform the work under an undefinitized letter contract, a procurement vehicle the federal government sometimes uses to speed awards for work deemed urgent. A North Wind spokesperson on Wednesday deferred to DOE for comment. A DOE spokesperson Thursday would not say why “the site’s mission needs dictate that work begin as soon as possible,” but did say “DOE plans to finalize this contract within 90 days of award.”
Kobel Takes Top Spot at LATA
Linda Kobel has been appointed president and chief executive of Albuquerque consulting shop Los Alamos Technical Associates, the company announced Tuesday.
Kobel, who joined the firm in 2012, takes over for William Vantine. She was most recently president of the company’s Energy and Nuclear Division.
Los Alamos Technical Associates also announced Mike Kennicott will become executive vice president and chief operating officer. Kennicott will oversee all internal operations on a day-to-day basis.
Among other things, the 40-year-old company has worked on cleanup projects across the Energy Department’s weapons complex, including at the now-complete Rocky Flats site, the Separations Process Research Unit, the Paducah site, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management issued a one-year task order worth up to $2.8 million from its indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with SUNSi JV, of Pocatello, Idaho, for expert consultation at the agency’s Separations Process Research Unit site in Niskayuna, N.Y.
SUNSi Gets Consulting Deal From Energy Department at SPRU
Under the task order, SUNSi JV will “provide the services of full-time and part-time subject matter experts working to provide safety management system, environmental programs, and waste management oversight,” DOE said in a Tuesday press release.
Related programs include: Worker Safety & Health Programs, Contractor Assurance, Quality Assurance, Conduct of Operations, Radiation Protection Program, Nuclear Safety, Facility Safety, Environmental Programs, and Waste Management, DOE said.
SPRU is a former plutonium research facility from the 1940s, where DOE’s predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, made early forays into the chemistry of plutonium extraction. The facility is now undergoing decontamination and decommissioning.
