REGALBUTO ADDED TO Y-12 UPF RED TEAM
NS&D Monitor
3/28/2014
Monica Regalbuto may have a long wait to be confirmed by the Senate as the Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, but she’s filling part of the time on the Red Team examining alternatives to the Uranium Processing Facility planned for the Y-12 National Security Complex. NS&D Monitor has learned that Regalbuto has been added to the Red Team, which is chaired by Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason. The Red Team is expected to complete its work by April 15. Regalbuto was nominated to head up DOE’s cleanup program earlier this month. She currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fuel Cycle Technologies, and is on assignment at DOE from Argonne National Laboratory, where she is a senior chemical engineer. Regalbuto also was a member of an expert team assembled last year by then-Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to examine technical issues associated with the use of so-called “black cells” at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant.
REDUCING Y-12 PROTECTED AREA STILL A PRIORITY
NS&D Monitor
3/28/2014
It’s official: the WEPAR project at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant has been postponed. The project, West End Protected Area Reduction, was supposed to significantly shrink the plant’s high-security footprint and pave the way for cleanup workers without security clearances to gain access to inner parts of Y-12 to begin addressing the contamination—especially the mercury contamination—in and around old production facilities. While confirming that work on WEPAR was halted in January (and the funding request for the project in Fiscal Year 2015 was also with-drawn), National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Steven Wyatt emphasized the NNSA is still looking at ways to reduce the Oak Ridge plant’s Protected Area. He said it’s a priority.
It’s not exactly clear why WEPAR was postponed based on NNSA responses, but the crux may have been the fact that it was being funded under the umbrella of the Uranium Processing Facility and there is pressure at this time to reduce all costs associated with the expensive project.
FY 2014 Funding Shifted to Other Projects
According to FY 2015 budget documents, FY 2014 funding for WEPAR was $24 million. But, according to Wyatt, that money didn’t come to Y-12. It apparently was shifted to other projects elsewhere, but that information was not immediately available. “We still are pursing various options for reducing the size of the Y-12 ProtectedArea, but are no longer pursing the construction of WEPAR via the Uranium Processing Facility project,” Wyatt said. He added: “No decisions have been made at this time on possible methods to accomplish this work. We still have an overall goal to reduce the current Protected Area by about 45 percent, which allows a much lower cost for cleanup of large production buildings that are no longer needed for Y-12’s current or future missions and to reduce the area that requires a high level of security protection.”
The work scope once associated with WEPAR “has been absorbed into Y-12’s broader security upgrades project,” Wyatt said. He said there shouldn’t be any near-term impact on the mercury cleanup effort at Y-12 because those cleanup efforts are still years away. “The primary economic benefits of WEPAR are during D&D of mercury-contaminated facilities. However, no building D&D is currently planned until the post 2020 timeframe,” he said.
