ARLINGTON, VA — Contractor and federal managers from across the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex are using technology to help predict issues from workplace accidents to infrastructure failure, these people said at a meeting here Tuesday.
Using technology to help school new hires on potential hazards in a nuclear workplace is important amid the current influx of new employees, said Brian Hartman, project director of Bechtel’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant project at the Hanford Site in Washington state, at the Energy Facility Contractors Group annual meeting.
Likewise, Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership CEO Myrna Redfield said her Jacobs-led joint venture is using pipe crawlers and drones at the Paducah Site in Kentucky to inspect areas where it is difficult for humans to access.
At the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, where many staff are still working remotely, the nuclear-weapons-technology lab helps workers set up home offices ergonomically. Advanced technology is great, “but we can’t replace critical thinking,” said Laura McGill, Sandia’s deputy laboratories director and chief technology officer for nuclear deterrence.
Meanwhile, Consolidated Nuclear Security, a Bechtel-led joint venture, has seen its workforce at the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn, grow 15% in two years, said CEO Richard Tighe.
The two-site workforce has done several modernization projects while, at the same time, preparing for a new contract structure where operations of the two plants will be separated, Tighe said.
The National Nuclear Security Administration announced last week that it awarded a BWX Technologies-Fluor partnership a long-term management contract at Pantex worth up to $30-billion over 20 years.
