Bob McQuinn, an AECOM senior executive who, among other things, led the prime contractor team for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), for about a year following a 2014 accident, has announced he will retire at the end of August.
McQuinn is vice president of the company’s performance assurance and high-level waste sector. He has spent 42 years with AECOM and its predecessor companies, according to a Friday email from Todd Wright, AECOM’s executive vice president of operations for Nuclear and Environment.
McQuinn “has spent most of his career at our most challenging projects including the Savannah River Site, Hanford, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Wright said in the email. “He has been critical to many successes in the DOE complex having served in leadership roles in support of both the Environmental Management and National Nuclear Security Administration missions.”
In May 2014, URS Corp., which was bought by AECOM later that year, made McQuinn president and project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for DOE at the WIPP disposal site in New Mexico. McQuinn was asked to step in months after an underground radiological release forced the transuranic waste disposal site to close. McQuinn would help lead the contractor’s recovery effort for about 11 months before returning to an AECOM executive post. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would remain offline for about three years after the February 2014 accident.
McQuinn is a chemical engineer who has worked in management posts around the DOE complex since 1978.
