Brian Zieroth on Oct. 29 replaced Valerie McCain as Bechtel National’s project manager on the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) being built at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a company spokesperson said Monday.
Zieroth will now manage construction of a roughly $6.5 billion facility designed to mold uranium into shapes usable in nuclear weapons and naval reactors. Bechtel National is building the facility as a subcontractor to Y-12 management prime Consolidated Nuclear Security, on which the company is the senior partner.
Zieroth previously spent about two years as project manager for the Chemical Metallurgy & Research Replacement Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory: planned upgrades to the site’s production infrastructure for the fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium-pits.
Bechtel was until Nov. 1 the senior industry partner on the management and operations contractor that ran the lab for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. That management company, Los Alamos National Security, has been replaced by the nonprofit Triad National Security.
Before Los Alamos, Zieroth spent nearly 10 years in different project management roles at the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel is building for DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. He was also chief information officer for the project from 2012 through 2014. Zieroth has a bachelor’s of science in economics and management from the London School of Economics, according to his LinkedIn profile.
McCain is still with Bechtel National as project director for the Waste Treatment Plant, which will eventually process for disposal some portion of 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left by Cold War plutonium production at Hanford.
The National Nuclear Security Administration in March cleared the UPF project to transition to construction from design. The construction budget is expected to peak at $750 million in fiscal 2021, according to a five-year spending projection included with DOE’s 2019 budget request. The facility has a roughly $700 million budget for fiscal 2019. Construction is due to be completed by 2025.
