Tamara Miles is now the deputy director of small business programs for the Department of Energy’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. Miles took the position in December after spending nearly five years as procurement director at the Cincinnati—based Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center.
The Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, headed by acting director and principal deputy director Paul Ross, seeks to make it easier for small firms to do business with DOE.
An industry source mentioned Miles’ job change Wednesday.
While with the DOE Office of Environmental Management, Miles helped the nuclear cleanup branch move toward its end state contracting model.
Miles has served in a variety of DOE contracting positions since 2013 and before that was a contract specialist with the U.S. Air Force, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The last of the 11 buildings at the Department of Energy’s Biology Complex at Y-12 National Security Complex within the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has come down, the agency said in a June 8 press release.
The DOE and Oak Ridge cleanup contractor UCOR, an Amentum-Jacobs partnership, recently completed demolition of the six-story Building 9207, the biggest and final structure. Work crews began tearing down the 250,000-square-foot building in March after they finished demolition of the three-story Building 9210. The state of Tennessee signed off on the demolition of the two buildings in early 2019.
“This is the most significant skyline change we’ve achieved at Y-12 as we begin our new chapter of cleanup,” DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management boss Jay Mullis said in the press release.
The 18-acre tract where the Biology Complex was located will be used for construction of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) planned Lithium Processing Facility that will be used to supply tritium for future nuclear weapons work.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management expects to have the buildings’ foundations removed this fall. At that point the land will become available for reuse by NNSA.
The buildings at the Biology Complex went up in the 1940s and were first used to recover uranium from for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The facilities were later used for DOE’s research into the genetic effects of radiation on mice.
Firefighters at the Nevada National Security Site have completely contained the Cherrywood Fire that started burning on May 17 and spread over 26,410 acres of the former test site, the site said this week.
The fire crossed into a contaminated area less than a week after it started burning, but in a statement Monday, the Honeywell-led site prime contractor, Mission Support and Test Services, said there had been “no risk to health and human safety, and no offsite risk to the public.”
Wildfires are common in the American west and nuclear weapons sites are used to dealing with them. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Nevada National Security Site all deal with them during the summer months. The Cerro Grande wildfire that threatened Los Alamos in 2000 is perhaps the best known of these.
Just over a year ago, the Nevada National Security Site, aided by other federal first responders, put out another wild fire.
