ARLINGTON, VA— The Department of Energy’s National Cleanup Workshop, hosted by Energy Communities Alliance here over three days this week, was another packed, post-pandemic nuclear industry gathering.
There was just a sprinkling of mask-wearing participants, and, mask or not, most people seemed to eagerly socialize with their counterparts from across the nuclear weapons complex.
Like the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix and the Exchange Monitor’s own Radwaste Summit in Las Vegas earlier this year, there was much talk in sessions and in the hallways about recruiting the next generation of federal hires and contractor employees.
But there was a slight change of tone in the workforce discussion, with less time spent on recruiting and more on training people once they fill out their W-4 forms. The process is less awkward now with new hires again coming into a physical workspace, rather than just logging onto their work laptop from home, managers said.
Meanwhile, workshop goers hoping to hear DOE announce a multi-billion follow-up contract to Mid-America Conversion Services depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion contract, were disappointed.
The award of that contract, being expanded to include operation and management support for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky, should come out “soon,” said a senior DOE acquisitions boss, Angela Watmore.
While “soon” can be an elastic concept, DOE Office of Environmental Management senior adviser William “Ike” White told the Monitor it is a priority for the agency to issue the award this year.
Elsewhere at the show, there was plenty of optimism voiced in and outside the sessions about DOE’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, discussed recently at an industry day for the Hanford Site in Washington state on Sept. 22.
Environmental cleanup paired with the promise of new energy projects for local economies helps contractors deliver on a commitment to weapons complex communities, said Ken Rueter, CEO of Oak Ridge remediation prime United Cleanup Oak Ridge.
While it sounds like a typical “podium statement,” the weapons-to-energy drive shows localities “that they won’t be the next depressed coal region, they won’t be the next Appalachia” or the next textile town left hollowed out when the mill closes, Rueter said.
The promise of utility-scale energy projects on land now being used mainly as buffer space on weapons complex sites might also provide DOE business to companies yet to achieve a foothold at the sites.
While DOE says it wants to increase its cadre of contractors serving Cold War and Manhattan Project sites, breaking in is tough, a panel of representatives from the circuit’s biggest players said here Tuesday.
Preparing bids for major DOE nuclear site contracts can cost millions of dollars and winners have to deal with plenty of environmental risks and relatively thin profit margins, representatives from Amentum, BWX Technologies, Bechtel, Fluor and Jacobs said during the Tuesday discussion.
Greg Meyer, a senior vice president within Fluor, said the weapons complex work carries some of the highest liability risks and lowest profit factor within Fluor. On top of that, “there’s also fines and penalties” that can be assessed when things go wrong, he said. Thankfully, Fluor’s top brass is usually swayed because of this work’s link to national security, Meyer said.
