ARLINGTON, VA — William “Ike” White, the acting boss of the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup program, was set to kick off the main program for 2023 National Cleanup Workshop here Tuesday morning with an overview of priorities for the $8-billion-plus Office of Environmental Management.
With the clock ticking toward the Sept. 30 end of the 2023 fiscal year, the annual DOE workshop, hosted by the Energy Communities Alliance, will also hear from Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water development subcommittee.
Fleischmann will speak a couple of weeks after the White House asked the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate to pass a continuing resolution to keep government agencies funded at fiscal 2023 levels. The House included steep spending cuts in the appropriations bills they passed this summer. The Senate did not. DOE nuclear programs were largely spared from these cuts.
Other presenters Tuesday were to include Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk, Jeff Avery, White’s chief lieutenant at Environmental Management, and field office managers from the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and others.
Scheduled Wednesday headliners include James McConnell, associate principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), a House appropriator whose district borders Hanford, as well as Todd Shrader, the project management director for DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
Before taking the clean energy post, Shrader spent many years as a senior executive within Environmental Management, including a stint leading the Carlsbad, N.M., field office overseeing the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The Cleanup Workshop had something of a soft opening Monday with a half-day session for early career professionals that White also addressed.
