Over time, prominent historical figures such as Danish physicist Niels Bohr and New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra are said to have warned us that predictions are tough to make, especially about the future.
So despite the obvious challenges of prognostication, Weapons Complex Monitor will open the year with a few observations about some big things to watch in 2022.
- COVID-19 might not always be with us, but at least expect it to continue to affect where and how we work for the rest of 2022. The United States is entering the third year of the coronavirus pandemic and the DOE’s $7-billion-plus Office of Environmental Management (EM) is learning to live with it. There are about 28,000 federal staffers and contract workers across the EM cleanup complex and upwards of 90% of them are vaccinated against the illness.
- With most of its people vaccinated, DOE is pushing to return more staff on-site within the next two months. Whether and to what extent the more contagious omicron variant will affect these plans was not clear at this writing. Most people at headquarters in Washington were supposed to return to the office full time by February.
- William (Ike) White is poised to remain the top fed at EM for the foreseeable future. Most sources this publication has spoken lately don’t detect any big push by the Joe Biden administration to nominate an assistant secretary for environmental management soon. White has acted as the top nuclear cleanup boss since June 2019, and the administration seems to be taking an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” attitude, one industry source said Thursday. Given the time needed to get a political appointee vetted, nominated and confirmed by the Senate, a permanent EM-1 might only be in office 18 months before the end of a first Biden term, the source said. But if recent history is a guide there could be more churn in other management jobs, including in the field offices. Don’t be surprised to see the manager ranks become a bit more diverse in keeping with the vision of Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Finding new blood to replace seasoned federal hands becoming eligible for retirement also continues to concern DOE.
- Somehow, the DOE EM and its colleagues at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will work out the differences that sank one of last year’s biggest business opportunities, the management and operations contract for the Savannah River Site. While the NNSA would not comment about the role it wants to play at the site, where the nuclear weapons subagency harvests tritium and wants to build a big plutonium pit production plant, EM said last year that scrapped the competition to replace Savannah River Nuclear Solutions to make sure that whatever contract hits the streets next best addresses NNSA’s evolving needs at the site, which by the mid- or late-2030s figures to be less of a cleanup site and more of a production site, according to current plans.
- On the other side of the country, EM will pick a new liquid waste contractor for the Hanford Site, the agency’s largest, most expensive, most dangerous environmental cleanup. It has been more than a year now since the agency killed an award to a BWX Technologies-led team that would have succeeded the incumbent Ametum-led partnership, Washington River Protection Solutions. Final bids on the Hanford Integrated Tank Waste Disposition Contract were due this week.
- The Portsmouth and Paducah Sites will get a taste of the EM end-state contracting model when DOE wraps up competitions for a new remediation contract at Portsmouth in Ohio, and for depleted uranium hexafluoride operations at Portsmouth and its sister site in Kentucky.
- Topline EM funding will stay pretty static. The nuclear cleanup office’s funding for fiscal 2022, which is already one-third over, remains a strong bet to exceed $7-billion once again, even if it comes in the form of more continuing budget resolutions.
