ALEXANDRIA, VA. – Department of Energy officials kicked off the National Cleanup Workshop here Wednesday by praising the Office of Environmental Management and its contract workers for continuing remediation of nuclear site remediation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, in a pre-recorded message, thanked Environmental Management (EM) workers for “going into the worksite when not a lot of people were going into the worksite.”
“We got a lot done,” deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, Todd Shrader said. “It turns out we are doing almost everything we were doing before.”
In addition, EM’s top fed, Senior Adviser William (Ike) White said physical achievements like demolition of DOE buildings at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California and the 13,000th shipment of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico “did not happen remotely.”
White also alluded to the stop-and-start nature of the pandemic, saying DOE is not out of the woods yet.
Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk noted that $7.6 billion in funding has been sought for EM operations in fiscal 2022 to continue nuclear cleanup work.
The Cleanup Workshop was ongoing as of Wednesday morning. Other officials scheduled to speak today included DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff.
