Maryland-based Amentum has appointed senior vice president Jim Blankenhorn to lead its Technical Services business, which involves engineering, design and operation of environmental projects for domestic and international governmental customers.
The promotion is effective Monday, Amentum said in a Thursday press release. Technical Services does work for clients such as the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Aviation Administration, nuclear utilities, and other commercial or government entities.
Blankenhorn has spent over 30 years in the nuclear and environmental management industry. He has been with Amentum and its predecessor, a unit of AECOM, since April 2014 when he was deputy project manager and chief operating officer for the Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Blankenhorn has held high-level posts at Perma-Fix Environmental Services, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He recently retired as a brigadier general after serving for more than 33 years with the Army Reserve.
Glyn Trenchard was reassigned as the new assistant manager for safety and environment and the assistant manager for safety and quality at the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board mentioned the assignment in a recent report about Hanford, dated Sept. 24 and posted this week on the board’s website. He was previously acting in that role since the April 2021 reorganization allowed the two organizations to be led by a single senior executive service position.
In this role, Trenchard oversees Hanford tank farms and Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, and nuclear safety and quality assurance direction and oversight for all Hanford activities, according to a DOE biography. Previously, the federal official was the assistant manager for the tank farms project, which included oversight of the 222-S Laboratory.
“In the Dark of the Valley,” a documentary about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, is scheduled to air nationwide on the MSNBC cable network on Nov. 14 at 10 p.m. Eastern Time, the Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles and other groups announced recently.
The documentary film explores a 1959 nuclear accident involving a commercially-owned sodium experimental reactor at the 2,800-acre property owned by Boeing and now being cleaned up by the company along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Energy.
“The affected community has demanded a full cleanup of the area for decades, but the site’s corporate and government landowners and their persuasive lobbyists have successfully stalled any hope of a cleanup — until recently,” according to a notice on the MSNBC website.
One of the documentary’s key figures is Melissa Bumstead, whose daughter was twice diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.
The DOE recently removed the last of its final 18 buildings from the site about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles although the state of California has said soil and groundwater cleanup could last into the 2030s. The agency and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, did nuclear research, initially supporting the government’s breeder reactor program, within its Energy Technology Engineering Center from the 1950s into the 1980s.
The Department of Energy is renewing a five-year, $34-million cooperative agreement with the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, according to a press release from the lab.
In addition to its research, the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory is located at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and evaluates environmental consequences of the agency’s work at the 310-square-mile federal complex.
Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a DOE partner for 70 years, was also a factor in the university’s decision to participate in the Battelle Savannah River Alliance that now operates the Savannah River National Laboratory, according to the release.
