The following exit interview with Department of Energy Savannah River Operations Office Manager Dave Moody, who is retiring this week after nearly five years as site manager, was conducted May 27 by ExchangeMonitor Senior Editor Kenneth Fletcher.
WC Monitor
5/29/2015
What would you like to be seen as Savannah River’s major achievements during your five-year tenure at the site?
Well, certainly the fact that we’re no longer a closure site, we don’t see ourselves as a closure site, nor does anyone else. Our staff are pulling together as a team and moving the site forward. As part of that, H-Canyon is alive and well with a number of missions. When I came onboard we were looking at closing down that unique facility, and that’s no longer the case.
One of the facts I’m most proud of is that we’ve cleaned and closed four high-level waste tanks on my tenure, and there are two more ready to go. Regardless of overall impressions of the Recovery Act, we were able to clean and repurpose 85 percent of this site for industrial reuse, and as part of that demonstrated a new way to D&D reactors with the P and R reactors. Grouting them in place and saving billions of dollars I think will set the stage for how we as a country could D&D commercial nukes in the future and not break the bank in doing so. So having used the Recovery Act funds to demonstrate that approach I think is an extremely important accomplishment for the site.
Certainly seeing Savannah River National Laboratory reach the same prominence as the other national laboratories, not just through its ten year celebration, but being the go-to lab for cleaning up Fukushima and cutting-edge technologies for environmental cleanup. Also, there’s the fact that we’ve recovered the Salt Waste Processing Facility and it is on track for construction to be complete this time next year.
In the clean energy arena we’ve got the largest biomass cogeneration plant in the federal complex, and we’re actively expanding on that as we speak to give us a little more protection for the next cold weather event. I’m very pleased that it was on my watch that we shut down the last 50’s vintage coal-fired power plant. A little known fact is that Savannah River Ecology Lab is healthy and performing great research, continuing the 60-year history of radio ecology at the site. The partnership between the Savannah River National Lab and the Savannah River Ecology Lab has really led to innovations in environmental clean-up where we’re shutting down labor-intensive pump and treat systems to replace them with natural attenuation and next-generation minimal energy treatment systems.
I’m really proud of the community and how it stepped up in support of the site, the extreme support that we’ve received directly from the local communities. Even our regulators as we arm-wrestle and disagree, they are always there to work with us to shorten review times and try to move the site forward in clean-up. Certainly, I am happy with our Congressional delegation support from both Georgia and South Carolina. So all of those things really are things I look back on over my tenure and I’m really thankful to have had a role to play in this.
There’s been a lot of cleanup progress made in the last several years, and as you mentioned Savannah River has gone from being a closure site to seeing a lot of possibilities for the future. You have been elemental in that whole effort with the creation of the Enterprise SRS vision for the site. Are you concerned that after you leave Savannah River could go back to being seen as a closure site? Is this a battle that’s going to have to be fought again in the future?
Our perspective has changed as a site and the community’s perspective partners with ours, so I don’t believe it will change. I think we’re on a path and we’ll move forward on that path.
You’ve listed a lot of achievements, but I know that there have also been a lot of challenges. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in the last several years?
Probably the biggest challenge really has been the impact of sequestration. To have all the elements in our high-level waste program operating and to run at one-third capacity really is a reflection of sequestration and the extremely tight budgets. If we were able to see ourselves out of that particular type of budget, look at the progress that we would make if we were able to empty tanks faster and if we were able to run our pilot facility, ARP/MCU at 4 million gallons a year instead of 1 million gallons, generating, 300 high-level waste canisters a year instead of 125 to 150, and working off the highly enriched uranium used fuel in L-Basin faster to meet our 40-ton commitment to TVA of down-blended material much faster.
So that’s the biggest challenge. I mean we certainly had some shorter term challenges with the lapse of appropriations. I really was very proud of our two major contractors and their partnering together to implement the same controls in that short window of time. That made our job much easier so that we weren’t trying to deal with two totally different approaches to a lapse in appropriations. So while that was a trying time, seeing the partnership even between our competimates, our two major contractors, was a plus.
What did you learn about adapting to new budget situations quickly when unexpected things crop up like the government shutdown?
The thing that we certainly learned is the importance of engaging the workforce, because if the rumors run wild and there are uncertainties within the workforce, you wind up with accelerated attrition, you wind up with individuals that are distracted. So a lesson that we certainly have learned is communicate, communicate, and communicate to our workforce so that they are totally aware of where we are and where we’re going because that uncertainty really undermines everything we want to achieve, including safety. So you have to make sure that you don’t lose sight of where the workforce is, what they’re feeling, and how they’re coping.
Is there anything positive that has come out of the budget cuts? How about efficiencies, doing more with less funding?
Well, tremendous. One, our partnering with both of our contractors has paid dividends in improved efficiency. More importantly both of them embracing the Six Sigma approach to process improvements and exercising that—I mean we’ve seen a 25 percent reduction in our overheads at the site because of specific approaches including the Six Sigma approach. So no, not everything in tight budgets is bad.
Another difficult challenge has been the discussions with your regulators in the last year or so for extending the closure date for two high-level waste tanks, which led to a dispute resolution process. Those were the first two in a string of tanks where down the road you will have to renegotiate closure milestones. What did you learn the first go-around that could make it smoother down the road?
One of the most important things is that our longstanding history of partnership with our regulator, not forgetting our roles, each of us understanding that role, but even as we have tough negotiations. If we take tanks 12 and 16 as an example, at the same time that they were holding our feet to the fire on our established timelines, and in negotiations with us behind the scenes, they were reducing their review cycles, they were working with us to do what they could do from their end to accelerate that process. As an example, we should start grouting in tank 16 in the next two weeks because they’ve shortened their review cycle. So we should never lose sight of the long history of partnership with our regulators. No matter how tense the specific issue becomes, we cannot let that divide us from recognizing that both of us want the same thing, we both want to clean up the site as fast as possible in the most effective and efficient manner. So will there be interesting challenges in the future? Yes. But the lessons learned here is that to the extent possible you continue the partnership while you’re arm-wrestling over specific issues.
I know there are alternative approaches being considered to operationally closing and grouting the tanks one by one. For example, instead the focus could be on emptying as much tank waste as possible quickly in order to reduce risk across the tank farm before starting grouting efforts. Is that something that you’re seeing is gaining momentum?
It’s certainly been broached with the regulators and we’ve discussed with them some of the advantages to that approach. As we discuss efficiencies, if one were to envision emptying a whole tank farm before starting the grout, and instead of trucking the grout having a grout plant right there, we could have a substantial savings in time and money for not having to truck grout from a nearby grout plant. So we’ve been discussing that with our regulators and we’ve not settled on it. I would not say that they’ve accepted that as an alternative approach but it certainly is one that’s attractive to them when you start thinking about the ability to potentially get out of an entire tank farm.
Moving over to H-Canyon, you mentioned that it came back from the brink of being shut down a few years ago. While there are a host of new missions for that facility being considered, there are still hurdles for many of those, including agreements with foreign countries and funding cuts for the downblending campaign. Are you confident that it will remain up and running for the next 10 years or so? Do you think that it has a life beyond that?
You know, H-Canyon is a unique resource. It’s not the answer to everything, and I think we have to look at advanced methods to handle some of these materials internationally and how we apply some of the technologies that our chemical industry has learned in smart processing and how you can tailor processes so that you don’t have to have these large mega facilities.
H-Canyon is alive and well, and has a huge mission. We don’t need to be inventing missions for H-Canyon. So where there are alternative approaches, we need to be looking at them and we are. But for instance, we’ve got a lot of highly-enriched uranium research reactor fuel sitting in L Basin and we are leveraging work for Canada with working off some of those materials. So we have a commitment over the next few years to deliver another 40 tons of down-blended uranium to TVA, and so I see us living up to that commitment. From our cost-benefit analysis, we still find that it’s less expensive to process the used fuel from L Basin than to consider dry storing that material. I think H Canyon will have a mission for a while. I don’t know if that mission is going to run beyond 10 years or not.
H-Canyon is one of several Savannah River facilities that has experienced conduct of operations issues in the last year or two. What has DOE’s response been to the recent spate of operations issues across the site? How do you ensure that there’s sufficient and effective oversight of the contractors?
We evaluate the nature and extent of any conduct of ops issue. We look at root causes for those, and before the contractor even engages in corrective actions, we go through that very carefully with our own independent analysis and augment their corrective action plan. So we look at them very carefully, we make sure that they’ve gone deep enough, and that we’re comfortable that the corrective actions really will get us back to the level of conduct of operations that we expect being one of the safest sites in the DOE complex. But what we never do is take our eyes off the ball. So we always are present overseeing those operations and have our knowledgeable safety officers and safety engineers and facility representatives present and engaged.
I’m asking this through the prism of the events last year at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. You were manager of the Carlsbad Field Office before moving to Savannah River. Have those incidents changed the way you approach oversight at Savannah River?
Well, we’ve certainly taken the lessons learned from Carlsbad, and evaluated our program against them. We’ve tweaked our program based on those lessons learned. We certainly did not need a wholesale overhaul of our program, but we’ve learned a lot from those issues. It’s important now to continue to partner to provide the support that it needs to recover and get back on its feet as well as to monitor that recovery process because I think we as a Department have additional lessons to learn in the recovery aspect as well. So that story is not over by any means.
One of the actions that have been taken is a look at deferred maintenance at the sites. I know that the contractors have identified many maintenance issues and have made some progress in reducing those backlogs at the site. That seems to have been one of the takeaways for Savannah River.
It certainly is. We already had an infrastructure maintenance prioritized list, but it drove us even when we really couldn’t afford it to pick those top-hitting items and scrape together to fund them. Our analysis showed us that our safety maintenance was up to par and that really was not a problem. It’s really those general systems that would not cause us to operate unsafely, but may cause us not to operate. They are not safety systems, but they certainly are part of the processing requirement. So picking a few of those every year and just knocking them off and getting them out of the way and looking at imaginative ways of funding those I think is then an important lesson learned that we have to bite the bullet regardless and pick those and take care of that deferred maintenance.
From a site manager’s perspective, have you seen any impact from not having the Senate confirmed EM-1 in the last several of years? Does that at all change your interactions with DOE headquarters, OMB, or others that you deal with?
I think we all benefit when we have a stable senior management cadre. I’m very happy with the individuals that have been in acting roles. You know, starting with Dave Huizenga, and most recently Mark Whitney, the communication channels have always been open. They’re willing to listen, and as you well know I’m one for pushing the envelope. I haven’t been thrown out of their office yet even though you might expect that someone in an acting position might not be as amenable to those pushing the envelope, I’ve really had very good reception from all of the interims in looking at what we can do to continue to improve on our efficiency. So you know, we always miss a beat when we don’t have EM-1 and the other senior management team finalized, but in reality we’ve had good quality people at the helm and their hearts have been in the right place and we move forward.
What will you miss most about being manager of the site? And what’s next for you?
Well, leaving is certainly bittersweet. My philosophy that I’ve tried to live by is that senior managers really should rotate out about every five years. I still believe that that is about the right frequency. It brings in fresh blood. It keeps things from getting stale. And it challenges you, it challenges your staff and keeps everything fresh. But it is certainly bittersweet. The thing that I had no way of knowing in coming in was the quality of staff here. You know, we started from the premise that we are in a closure site, let’s move the site forward, and then we started building the team. The part of Enterprise SRS that’s there, but not overtly advertised is really the teamwork approach that’s required to achieve all those goals. I’ve been very proud, we’ve been on a cultural growth mission since day one here at the site, trying to grow together as a team, trying to address what were some trust issues, trying to make sure that the communication channels were open. So what I’m going to miss most, especially since I’ve got a year of limited communication to DOE, is I really will miss the teamwork and interactions with the team.
As far as what I will be doing in the future, my wife has a number of things outlined. The summer will be a time of regrouping and I’ve sort a commitment to use the summer to regroup. I do not plan on working full-time, but I will pick and choose projects. I’m going to stay in the region and so I’m very committed to helping regionally. I am still a firm believer that this region will drive the nuclear future of this country and I’m committed to that, and I’d like to pick and choose those projects that will ultimately help reinvigorate the nuclear industry in our country. So you know, nothing is firm, but I certainly will continue to be engaged. It’ll be different.
