Joel Duling will resign as president of BWT Technology’s mainstay Nuclear Operations Group effective July 29, the company wrote in a regulatory filing dated Monday.
Duling informed the company of his decision on July 12, according to the 8-K filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
“Joel Duling is retiring from BWXT to pursue other interests, and we wish him well going forward,” a BWX Technologies (BWXT) spokesperson wrote Wednesday in an email. “We will announce his successor at a later date.”
Duling has been president of the Lynchburg, Va.-based Nuclear Operations Group, which handles the company’s bread-and-butter naval reactors work for nuclear warships and submarines, since June 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously spent four years as president of BWX Technologies’ (BWXT) Nuclear Fuel Services subsidiary, which manufactures uranium fuel for the U.S. nuclear Navy.
As a condition of leaving the company, Duling signed a one-year non-compete with BWXT that runs through July 18, 2023, according to the 8-K filing. Duling was 59 years old when BWXT in March filed its most recent proxy statement.
A problem transuranic waste container returned to the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory after radioactive liquid was detected at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in April has “pin hole leaks,” according to a recent report from a federal safety board.
The TRUPACT-148 shipment was returned to Idaho National Laboratory in May and in June operators determined that one of the drums had pin-hole leaks in the bottom, according to the staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). “A team of six staff members are reviewing the contents of the problematic drum and have begun to research specific waste streams from which the contents of the drum originated.”
The container with six drums inside prompted the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to evacuate a service waystation for contact-handled waste after the free-standing liquid was discovered at the bottom of the container. The DOE temporarily suspended shipments from Idaho, WIPP’s biggest shipper, for a few weeks.
New Mexico’s traditional summertime monsoon rain season has dramatically lowered the risk of wildfires around the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory lately, a federal safety board said in a recent update.
“Recent monsoonal rain events have increased moisture levels and lowered the wildland fire risk,” the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said in a regular staff report dated June 24. Triad National Security, which operates the lab for DOE, lowered its fire restrictions on laboratory property from Stage III to the less prohibitive Stage II, on June 23, DNFSB said.
This came a week after the DNFSB reported that the Cerro Pelado wildfire west of the laboratory “is now 100% contained,” and the Los Alamos Emergency Operations Center exited monitoring mode.
At one point there were 1,000 firefighters battling the blaze which started April 22 and came within a couple of miles of laboratory property for a time.