Chris Kemp left his job as deputy federal project director for retrieval and closure at the Energy Department’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site for another DOE job, an agency spokesperson said last week.
Kemp, who remains at the Washington state site, is now director of the environmental compliance division at the Office of River Protection’s technical and regulatory support office. The DOE spokesperson did not say who would replace the vacancy Kemp left in the tank farms division. The Office of River Protection manages cleanup of liquid waste at the former plutonium production site near Richland, Wash.
Earlier this month, at a meeting of the DOE-chartered Hanford Advisory Board citizens group, Kemp estimated it would cost more than $40 million to empty the site’s leaky double-shell Tank AY-102.
The tank, which may not be repairable, was a key cog in DOE’s campaign to solidify more than 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste created by Cold War-era operations at Hanford. Tank AY-102 was to feed liquid waste into the Waste Treatment Plant contractor Bechtel National is building at Hanford. The plant is expected to start treating Hanford’s least radioactive liquid waste by 2023, and to start treating the site’s most dangerous liquid waste by the mid-2030s.
