The looming departure of Los Alamos National Laboratory federal field manager Michael Mikolanis will mark the second swap of Environmental Management field bosses across the Department of Energy’s old weapons complex in a little more than a year.
These days, most site feds have a tenure of fewer than six years. These people are the government’s senior-most delegates at major nuclear-weapons cleanups that are often major employers in rural communities.
Below, in alphabetical order by last name, is the Exchange Monitor’s latest survey of federal executives at some of the larger Office of Environmental Management sites, where DOE spends most of its roughly $8-billion-a-year nuclear cleanup budget.
Mark Bollinger became manager of the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico during May 2023 after serving as acting manager since January. He initially became acting deputy manager in March 2021 of the field office that oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Before coming to Carlsbad, Bollinger logged 14 years as deputy manager at DOE Office of Science’s Fermi Site in Illinois.
Joel Bradburne was appointed manager of DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office in Lexington, Ky., two years ago after serving as its acting manager for four months. The Environmental Management office oversees both the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky. Bradburne was previously the deputy manager for four years. Before that, he spent about eight years as site lead for Portsmouth. He has about three decades of nuclear-related experience in both government and private industry.
Michael Budney has led the DOE Environmental Management field office at the Savannah River Site for nearly six years, since February 2018. He became a fed after working at Northrop Grumman and spending 29 years in the Navy, retiring as a captain.
Connie Flohr has led DOE nuclear cleanup at the Idaho National Laboratory since February 2020 after serving as deputy manager there for almost three years. Flohr has served in a variety of DOE managerial roles, including the Office of Environmental Management’s budget director for almost a decade, according to her bio.
In January 2023, after three years as the federal manager there, Reinhard Knerr left the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico in order to return to the Midwest and take the No. 2 job at DOE’s Lexington, Ky.,-based Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office.
Michael Mikolanis, Environmental Management-Los Alamos field office boss, is leaving the DOE cleanup office in the first quarter of 2024 to join DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as field office manager of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. NNSA plans to assume landlord duties for the site near the Georgia line from Environmental Management by fiscal 2025, which starts Oct. 1, 2024. Mikolanis has been in his Los Alamos posting since August 2021.
Jay Mullis has been field manager for cleanup at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee for more of the years than not since November 2017, according to his DOE bio. For a 14-month stretch, from November 2021 through January 2023, he was acting head of regulatory and policy affairs at DOE Environmental Management headquarters in Washington, D.C. Deputy Oak Ridge manager Laura Wilkerson ran things while Mullis was away.
Brian Vance is closing in on five years as the boss for both field offices serving the entire 580-square mile Hanford Site in Washington state. Since July 2020 Vance has been officially running both the Richland Operations Office and Office of River Protection, although he ran both on an acting basis since February 2019. Hanford’s Office of River Protection and Richland Operations Office will revert back to a single field office in fiscal 2025. Vance is a former CH2M nuclear manager and a retired Navy nuclear submarine officer, according to a DOE biography posted online.
