This week’s news that Reinhard Knerr will leave his job as manager of the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office to take a deputy manager post at the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office was unusual but not shocking, industry sources said Thursday.
Knerr is the second permanent Carlsbad Field Office manager since the spring of 2019. Deputy Mark Bollinger will become the third acting boss there during that period, based on a search of Exchange Monitor archives, as well as corresponding DOE biographies and news releases. The moves started when Todd Shrader, now with the DOE office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, left Carlsbad in mid-2019 to take the second-in-command post at the DOE Office of Environmental Management.
When asked if Knerr or DOE initiated the move, a spokesperson from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Washington did not directly respond but replied with an email praising both Knerr and Bollinger.
During Knerr’s time at Carlsbad, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant “made immense progress under his leadership including navigating through COVID, improving stakeholder engagement, and increasing shipments,” the DOE spokesperson said. Progress was also made on key infrastructure projects at the disposal site, the spokesperson said.
Turnover-wise, a panel discussion during DOE’s Cleanup Workshop in September indicated most managers at Environmental Management’s big field offices don’t stick around for eons.
Michael Budney, who oversees cleanup at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is one of the more senior, about to hit the five-year mark in one spot. Brian Vance became the permanent boss for the two different field offices at the Hanford Site in Washington state in July 2020 after serving as acting boss for both for more than a year.
While Jay Mullis has been Environmental Management’s acting boss of policy and regulatory matters since November 2021, he is about to resume his role as field office manager of the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, which he was formally appointed to in November 2017, after acting in that role for about two years.
While unusual for a weapons complex field office manager to leave such a job to become a No. 2 at another field site, a trio of sources contacted by Exchange Monitor did not consider the move shocking. All three industry sources speculated that Knerr either wanted to return to Kentucky, where he lived and worked before, or alternatively had grown tired of living around Carlsbad and Eddy County, N.M.
The Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce touts the area as a “gem” known for the Carlsbad Caverns National Park and other natural attractions but two managers with DOE contractors said the southeast New Mexico city of 31,000 can feel isolated for some people.
One contractor executive, who considers Knerr a talented manager, describes Carlsbad and Eddy County, N.M., as a “flat, hot, rough desert” location that is not for everybody.
A May 2022 Government Accountability Office report on infrastructure issues at WIPP said “recruiting and retaining technically capable staff in the WIPP area is a long-standing, well documented issue that the contractor and DOE headquarters have had limited success in resolving.”
It should be noted that Piketon, Ohio, population 2,100, and Paducah, Ky.,population 26,000, where the former gaseous diffusion plant sites are located, are not big cities either. Those destinations, however, are within easy weekend driving distance of population centers such as Cincinnati and Nashville.
The closest comparable population center to Carlsbad, N.M., is Albuquerque, N.M., about four-and-a-half hours away by car. With a population of more than 550,000 people, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, is nearly twice as big as Cincinnati and nearly as large as Nashville, according to data from the 2020 U.S. census.
