Three long-tenured officials in the Washington State Ecology Department’s nuclear waste program planned to retire beginning in May, an agency spokesperson said.
Starting May 1, Theresa Howell will be the new Tri-Party Agreement Section Manager and Beth Rochette will be the new Cleanup Section Manager at Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program, a spokesperson for the agencies told the Exchange Monitor in an email on Thursday April 20.
Howell and Rochette are being promoted, the spokesperson said. Both already work in Ecology’s nuclear program.
Rochette will replace Nina Menard, who will retire at the end of April. Howell will replace John Price, the Tri-Party Agreement Section Manager, who will retire from Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program at the end of May, the spokesperson for the state agency said.
Dib Goswami, a hydrogeologist in the program, also planned to retire, the Ecology spokesperson said Thursday, but “his exact retirement date is still up in the air.”
The three officials have worked on Hanford issues “for many years,” the spokesperson said.
Washington State, through its Department of Ecology, is a partner in the Tri-Party Agreement that governs cleanup of the Hanford Site, along with the Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Hanford, the former plutonium production complex in eastern Washington state by the Columbia River, is according to DOE the largest, longest running and most complex nuclear-weapons cleanup project in the U.S. There are about 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste stored underground in tanks at Hanford.
