ARLINGTON, VA — Talks about the contractual future of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, ongoing for years between the Office of Environmental Management and the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, could bear fruit within three months, the head of the cleanup office said here Thursday.
William (Ike) White made the remark Thursday during kickoff of the National Cleanup Workshop hosted by the Energy Communities Alliance.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have been engaged in long-running talks about the cleanup office eventually relinquishing landlord control of the federal site to NNSA, which is preparing to build a large factory at the site to cast plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages.
In response to a question from ExchangeMonitor, White said the two nuclear offices hope to have details within a few months that can be shared with the communities in South Carolina and Georgia, around the Savannah River Site.
Meanwhile, the end of ongoing “holistic” talks, as the parties call them, with the state of Washington over cleanup at the Hanford Site are expected within a next year, White said. The closed-door talks with a federal mediator are collaborative and making headway, he said.
Both sets of talks will have impacts across the DOE weapons complex that will last for “decades,” said White, the senior adviser for EM. As a result, the process takes time and cannot be rushed, White said.
During his address to the cleanup workshop, White pledged that moving stranded drums of transuranic waste away from Waste Control Specialists is a priority. The drums have been at the privately-owned waste disposal site in Andrews County, Texas since 2014.
The drums were rerouted to Waste Control Specialists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in what was initially supposed to be a very short layover. The situation became more long-term after it was learned that some of the drums had similar characteristics to one that overheated, blew open and leaked radiation underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014.
White boss offered no timeline for relocating of the waste from the Texas site.
White also said recruiting to compensate for upcoming retirements remains crucial. One quarter of the EM workforce is eligible to retire “today” and half within five years, he added.
Also on Thursday, EM released its “Program Plan for 2022,” a 100-plus page document to identify a long-term strategy to speed up remediation of Cold War and Manhattan Project sites.
“I encourage our partners across the complex to join us in a discussion on the strategy,” he said. The document builds upon the previously-published strategic plan for 2022 through 2032.
