The White House on Tuesday nominated a former Capitol Hill staffer as general counsel for the Department of Energy.
William Cooper is currently senior counsel and director in the Washington, D.C. branch of McConnell Valdés, a corporate law firm based in Puerto Rico. His prior positions as a congressional staffer include staff director for the House Natural Resources mineral resources subcommittee, senior policy adviser on the National Environmental Policy Act for the Natural Resources Committee, and general counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Cooper has also worked as a lawyer in Tennessee and served as executive director and then president of the Center for Liquified Natural Gas.
The general counsel position is currently held on an acting basis by longtime DOE hand Theodore Garrish, who is also the department’s assistant secretary for international affairs.
The Senate has yet to confirm a DOE general counsel during the Trump administration. Nominee David Jonas, a former lawyer for the Energy Department and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, withdrew from contention in January following some bumps in his confirmation process last year.
The search for a new executive director is over for an advocacy group for localities around the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
The Regional Coalition of LANL Communities (RCLC) recently retained the firm CPLC New Mexico to provide it with executive director services. Eric Vasquez has become the new RCLC executive director and CPLC will also provide the organization with clerical staff and a tribal liaison, according to a July 23 article in the Los Alamos Daily Post.
The newspaper reported the RCLC executive director agreement has an annual cost of about $169,000.
Reached by telephone briefly Wednesday, Vasquez confirmed he has just started on the job after being formally hired at a July 20 meeting of the RCLC board.
The coalition had been without a director since the end of February, when the board did not renew Andrea Romero’s contract in the wake of a dispute over expense reimbursements. Romero went on to win a June Democratic primary election to represent the 46th State District in the New Mexico House of Representatives.
“It is unfortunate that the whole thing happened,” because the RCLC does excellent work for the region, Vasquez said Wednesday.
The RCLC was formed in 2011 and seeks maximum federal funding for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Office of Environmental Management operations at Los Alamos. It also works to ensure local people benefit economically from the government facility.
Vasquez served as senior policy analyst for former New Mexico Lt. Gov. Diane Denish from 2006 to 2010, and has also worked in regional economic development in New Mexico. Since 2015, he has been co-owner of the Valley Daily Post online newspaper, a sister publication to the Los Alamos Daily Post. He is married to state Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard (D).
Fluor Idaho is in the advanced stages of its investigation into the cause of an April 11 incident in which four drums of radioactive sludge overheated and ejected their lids, causing waste to spill onto the floor at an Idaho National Laboratory facility.
Representatives of the contractor, Energy Department officials in Idaho, and the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality expect to meet Aug. 6 to discuss the company’s investigation and preliminary findings.
In a progress report filed with the state Monday, covering the company’s response to the incident from June 22 to July 19, Fluor Idaho said the contamination level in the Accelerated Retrieval Project 5 area has improved enough to reduce the degree of protective equipment worn by cleanup workers. Sweeping and vacuuming up the spilled material has greatly reduced contamination in the airlock, the report says.
Previously, Fluor Idaho has said “a significant portion” of the potential 220 gallons of repackaged waste sludge spilled out. “Prevention of further spread of radiological contamination has been a higher priority than an exact count of the spill volume,” said Brian English, a hazardous waste permitting manager with DEQ. Recovery is not complete. Walls and ceilings are being wiped to remove contamination.
Additional tests will include “flammable gas sampling” of sludge from the four drums involved in the incident. During cleanup work on May 24 “a spark” was seen in spilled material on the floor, according to the report.
The ARP is located within the Radioactive Waste Management Complex, set up at INL in the 1950s to bury low-level radioactive waste from research operations.
The company still expects to conclude is cleanup and decontamination of the accident site in September and issue its investigation report in November. No date has been set yet for resumption of sludge repackaging at the Waste Management Facility.
“Future changes to the facility or operations will be determined based upon the investigation conclusions and issuance of the final investigation report,” Fluor Idaho said.
Cost figures from the cleanup are not immediately available, a Fluor spokesman, Erik Simpson said in a Thursday email.