Staff Reports
WC Monitor
12/11/2015
Mark Whitney, the No. 2 officer in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, was the keynote speaker Wednesday at the Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association’s annual Business Opportunities Conference in Knoxville. He gave attendees – many of them contractors in the department’s cleanup programs – an overview of what’s going right with the program as well as some of the steep challenges facing DOE in the months and years ahead.
“We have a difficult situation – you all know that – with budget,” Whitney said.
Meeting compliance requirements, keeping the facilities operating, and carrying out all the cleanup work across the country that needs to be done on a daily basis would cost the office about $8 billion a year, according to DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for EM. “We don’t have an $8 billion-a-year budget, and we’re not going to get that anytime soon,” he said. EM requested close to $6 billion for fiscal 2016, which began on Oct. 1; a final budget for the year is still being negotiated in Congress.
The budget situation is why it’s important, Whitney said, for DOE to step back and take a close look at the situation and “try to get to a better place” with environmental regulators, stakeholders, and other key partners to plan the work in a realistic and effective way.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the states know the challenges, he said. “At the end of the day, they want the same things that we do,” he said. While not expecting agreement on priorities, there is a need for ongoing dialogue so that decisions can be fully informed early in the process, he said.
Whitney cited the importance of the new five-year budget planning process in making consistent progress on a workload that gets bigger and bigger all the time – especially with excess DOE buildings being shifted to the cleanup program for decontamination and decommissioning.
“The vast majority of our projects, they’re not one-year projects,” he said. “They’re one-of-a-kind, first-of-kind, not easy, projects, so we need to stop planning our budgets one year at a time. … We just need to get past the impediments to getting that done.”
He said a 10-year plan is being developed to help ensure good decisions are made on spending the limited allotments of money.
The cleanup program has had many accomplishments over the past 25 years, and the department intends to take the initiative in communicating those successes in the next couple weeks in some of the DOE communities, he said.
But there also are major issues, such as the concerns at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, which has been shut down for almost two years due to “a couple of very significant events,” he said. Whitney noted that the schedule for resuming operations at the transuranic waste storage site had been reevaluated and that the start date had been pushed back from March 2016. A new date has not been announced, though DOE says it aims to reopen WIPP in 2016.
“It would compromise, we thought, too much safety, and we felt it was not the right thing to do,” Whitney said of the postponed WIPP reopening. So work is focusing on a new schedule at the facility, he said, noting, “The workforce there has been phenomenal.”
He told the EBETA conference crowd that one of the primary challenges facing the EM program is the number of excess facilities at DOE sites that need to be cleaned up and eventually demolished. “When it comes to excess facilities, the first thing to keep in mind is we’re talking about a tremendous number of facilities,” Whitney said.
The EM program started with more than 5,000 excess buildings, and the program has done D&D on more than 2,500 of them. However, there are about 1,000 additional facilities coming into the program from other parts of DOE – NNSA, Science, and Nuclear.
“So that’s about another 1,000 to add to the list,” he said, noting that D&D is the second-largest component of the EM budget on an annual basis. “At times the list seems never-ending and seems to grow, but measurable progress is being made.”
Whitney cited some of the successes at nearby Oak Ridge, where workers last year completed demolition of K-25 – once the world’s largest building under one roof – which required tremendous resources and dedication. The success of K-25 is now being applied to K-27, the last of the gaseous diffusion process facilities at the East Tennessee Technology Park.
He praised Oak Ridge contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge for scheduling and sequencing the work in a way that allows the workforce to be moved effectively from project to project without having to mobilize repeatedly. But he also noted the continuing difficulties, recalling a visit a day earlier to the Oak Ridge site, where he toured the K-1037 facility, where a myriad of hazards remain from the barrier production and other activities and where past records don’t always match up accurately with what’s actually found when characterizing the site.
Overall, DOE’s EM program currently has about 30 prime contractors doing work with a value of about $50 billion, he said. Billions of dollars of work will put out for bids in the next couple years, and Whitney briefly addressed the ongoing issue of what kinds of contracts to use for what types of work. It’s not simple, he said.
“We’re taking a hard look,” the DOE official said, emphasizing that fixed-price contracting doesn’t always save money, particularly on some of the more challenging, high-risk projects with many unknowns.
Not only does each project need the right kind of contract for the company doing the work, but also the right kind for management and oversight, he said. “It can’t be all one-size fits all.”
