Bruce Covert has been appointed president of Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, one of the contractor’s parent companies, AECOM, said Thursday.
Covert will take over June 10. A nuclear-industry veteran, Covert was most recently AECOM group vice president and project director for waste management projects for Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd., the partnership leading cleanup and demolition of the former Dounreay fast reactor research and development site in Scotland. He has also worked for Washington Closure Hanford, the former river-corridor cleanup project contractor for DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
As president of Nuclear Waste Partnership, Covert will quarterback the resumption of transuranic waste disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which reopened late last year after a nearly three-year hiatus following an accident underground radiation release blamed on a shoddily packaged barrel of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.
Covert replaces Phil Breidenbach, who oversaw the WIPP recovery since April 2015 and will return to the parent company. Breidenbach “will return to AECOM supporting other projects in the DOE and nuclear market,” the company wrote in its statement.
Nuclear Waste Partnership is a partnership of AECOM and BWX Technologies.
