William (Ike) White, the top manager of the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch, expects excess contaminated facilities in the weapons complex to draw more attention in the next decade or so, he told a National Academies of Sciences board Wednesday.
Within that span, it will be time for the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to start considering “what the cleanup program of the future really looks like,” White told a virtual meeting of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. White is the senior adviser at Environmental Management (EM) and has been the office’s top career federal official for about three years.
By the mid-2030s, EM should be on its way to winding down key remediation work at many of its 15 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites, although decades of work would remain at the Hanford Site in Washington state, White said.
“We will hopefully be done with a lot of the work across the complex,” White said. “The bulk of the work that we have will be bringing in those excess facilities” from DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the Offices of Science as well as Nuclear Energy, and Naval Reactors, he added.
Working with those offices to analyze the needs of contaminated old facilities no longer being used “is something that we are required to report to congress” from time-to-time, White said in response to a question.
Many factors are considered by the $7.6-billion Environmental Management office and its sister offices, White said. Considerations include the level of risk posed by the old facility and another is the “hotel load” or year-over-year expense of keeping a decaying structure in a state of “cold standby” while it awaits demolition, he said.
“The needs of other programs,” is also a big deal, White said. “What other programs need, in terms of space in some very space-constrained areas” such as the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., or the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The cleanup office has “an interesting model underway” working with DOE’s Office of Naval Reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory, White said. There, the Naval Reactors office is basically a “customer” that works through its own program to obtain funding and then has EM conduct the cleanup, White said. Similar work has also been done for the Office of Naval Reactors in New York, he said.
Workforce Worries
Changing the topic to personnel, White said hiring people for openings at DOE is “about as hard as I’ve seen it.” White’s personnel theory is that many people are only recently getting around to making big life-changing decisions, such as retirement or changing jobs, which they put off during the pandemic.
“The pandemic creates a lot of uncertainty,” White said. “A lot of those backed-up decisions have been made,” in recent months, White said. While he indicated departures are up he did not offer any figures.
Like every other organization, the nuclear cleanup office is looking to hire people with cyber skills, White said. Unfortunately federal service cannot really match the salaries that people with such in-demand skills can find elsewhere, White said.
A goal for Environmental Management is to increase technology investment, much of which is currently dominated by the demands of site-specific projects like tank waste at the Hanford Site, White said.
