Unclear Who Will Head DUF6 Contractor BWCS Going Forward
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
3/14/2014
George Dials, a senior executive at Babcock & Wilcox, is leaving the company at the end of this month. Dials first joined B&W in 2006, when he served as president and CEO of B&W Y-12, LLC, and since late 2010 he has headed up B&W Conversion Services, LLC, which is made up of B&W and URS and is responsible for managing the two depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion plants at the Department of Energy’s Paducah and Portsmouth sites. “It’s been a really tough project,” Dials said of the DUF6 project in an interview with WC Monitor this week. “I’ve had a lot of different projects. It’s not the largest. It’s probably from a national security standpoint not the most important project I’ve ever done. But I’ll tell you it’s been one of the toughest in terms of dealing with tough issues, dealing with technical uncertainties and being able to identify and fix the things that were really impeding [progress].”
Explaining his decision to leave B&W, Dials said that he had originally signed on for a two-year commitment to lead BWCS, and then agreed to stay on for an additional year as the contractor worked to get the plants operating at high capacity. “It was just time. The plant has come a long way—both plants. The team is accomplished and working well together,” Dials said. “The plants are running well. The teams at both plants are doing a great job.” He added, “It’s the right time. You’ve got to pick a time, otherwise they just keep you dragging out.” Dials also said his departure “fits in” where B&W as a company currently stands as its contracts to manage the Y-12 and Pantex sites are now set to come to an end. “There’s a lot of shakeout in B&W as a result of Y-12/Pantex, so there’s some very talented people available,” he said.
One possible candidate to replace Dials at BWCS is Michelle Reichert, who previously served as deputy project manager and director of environment, safety and health before being moved to Pantex in the summer of 2013 to serve as deputy general manager there. Reichert did “a fabulous job” in her role at Pantex, Dials said, adding, “I imagine she’s a candidate, but there are others. … I’m not involved right now in that transition out of Y-12 and Pantex, but I know [B&W Technical Services Group Vice President and Chief Operating Officer] Chuck Spencer and those guys are looking at the quality people that are B&W folks that they need to find a home for.” B&W declined to comment this week on Dials’ planned departure.
Plants Have Increased Throughput
The two DUF6 conversion plants are intended to help disposition more than 700,000 metric tons of material stored in thousands of cylinders at the Paducah and Portsmouth sites. BWCS took over as the plants’ operating contractor from Uranium Disposition Services in the spring of 2011, and since then the contractor has pursued what Dials has described as an incremental approach to get the plants fully operational and increase production and availability. In Fiscal Year 2013, the plans processed a total of approximately 13,578 metric tons of material, exceeding a goal of 12,865 metric tons. So far this fiscal year, the plants have processed more than 9,600 metric tons of material, with BWCS facing an overall goal for Fiscal Year 2014 of processing 22,700 metric tons, according to Dials. “We developed an operating strategy where we were going to incrementally increase the plant throughput and availability. We’ve successfully done that in 2012/2013. We increased production substantially last fiscal year over the first year,” he said. “Our plan this year is a 47 percent increase—taking it from around 13,000 metric tons to [22,700]. So that’s substantial, and I do think the incremental steps are coming.”
One of the things Dials said he was most proud of during his tenure at BWCS is the work his team did to address the myriad of issues discovered at the plants during the transition from UDS. “We didn’t get the plant that was promised. There were lots of issues discovered during transition,” he said. “There was a lot of betting that because of the issues … with the way the DUF6 plants were designed, engineered and built, that they would never operate efficiently.” Dials said, “I think what we did, we learned a lot about the problems during transition. … but despite that we came together as a team and we didn’t spend a lot of time looking over our shoulder and blaming anybody for it. We buckled down, we paid attention to what needed to be done to fix it and that’s where we spent our time and energy.”
He added, “We knew the folks that were here before us—some of them are really good friends of ours. We didn’t try to blame anybody for anything. All we said is there are problems, we’ve got the team here that’s smart enough to do this, and we’re going to fix them. And we have. So I’m really proud of that.”
‘I’m Not Retiring’
Leaving B&W, Dials said he and his wife plan to return to their home in Santa Fe, N.M., but Dials stressed that he still plans to be involved in nuclear waste issues going forward. “I’m not retiring. … I’m in good health, thank God. I’m interested in lots of things. I intended to be actively engaged in dealing with important issues. I really would like to play some role in helping us find a path forward with the nuclear waste repository issue,” Dials said. “We’re going to go back to New Mexico. I’m going to re-establish some of my network there. I’ll probably get involved with some of the things that are going on in the state, certainly as it relates to WIPP and other things, but I’m really interested in seeing what happens next in terms of the national approach to a nuclear repository. I can’t imagine we want to wallow in this uncertainty of closing the nuclear fuel cycle. There’s too much at stake in terms of our national energy future, and we’ve got to deal with that if we’re going to move froward with a nuclear renaissance of any kind.”
