Frank Sheppard, former Parsons senior vice president and project manager of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is now part of a senior leadership board with Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), a company spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Parsons joined Huntington Ingalls in January and “is part of our Independent Performance Assessment Team (IPAT), a group of very senior personnel focused on driving continuous performance improvement across our portfolio,” spokesperson Jaime Orlando said in an email to Weapons Complex Monitor.
Parsons is using his nuclear infrastructure experience to assist Mission Support and Test Services, the Honeywell-led joint venture that includes HII, which is the DOE operator of the Nevada National Security Site. Sheppard’s work with the performance assessment team also supports Newport News Nuclear Los Alamos (N3B), Huntington-BWXT team in charge of legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Orlando said.
At Parsons, Sheppard helped navigate final stages of SWPF development including a sometimes contentious relationship with its customer, DOE over schedule slippage during the $2.3-billion contract for the facility.
Prior to HII, Sheppard was with Parsons since 2011, having previously worked with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and served as a civil engineer in the U.S. Navy.
The Energy Communities Alliance said Thursday it is disappointed the White House fiscal 2022 budget request for the Department of Energy curtails payments in lieu of taxes for localities around two of the largest federal nuclear cleanup sites. The group hopes to see this changed by Congress.
The Joe Biden administration’s request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would eliminate its payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) for the Hanford Site in Washington state, a $3.5 million cut, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a $5.7 million cut, the group representing federal nuclear site localities said in a Thursday letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
“PILT payments–which DOE proposes to zero out—are used to support vital local government functions such as school and hospital districts, roads and other critical infrastructure, and emergency services such as police and fire departments,” the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) chair, Ron Woody of Roane County, Tenn., said in the letter to Granholm.
“We are also wondering why these two communities were singled out by the Administration when they carry the burden of the two largest environmental cleanup projects in the country,” the ECA said in the letter.
“We think that will be fixed,” Seth Kirshenberg, the executive director of the ECA told the Energy Facilities Contractors Group during that organization’s virtual online meeting.
As of Monday, the Parsons-built Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina had processed 1.1 million gallons of waste since the October start of radioactive operations, DOE said in a press release this week.
The facility, central to DOE’s plan to empty most radioactive waste tanks at Savannah River within a decade, returned to operation May 3 after being down from more than a month, a likely mechanical failure of the Decontaminated Salt Solution coalescer, which is used to remove organic solvent residue, a DOE spokesperson said in a Friday email.
Parsons was to run SWPF for a full year before turning it over to Savannah River’s liquid waste contractor, currently Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation. By the end of 2021, around the time Parsons turns over control of the plant, DOE anticipates the facility will be able to process six million gallons of waste annually, a rate that should enable the site’s salt waste inventory to be processed, and tanks emptied, by 2031, the agency said.
The SWPF, which now operates around the clock, separates highly radioactive waste from the less-radioactive salt solution. Afterward, the high-activity waste is sent to the Defense Waste Processing Facility at Savannah River where it is vitrified into a glass form and placed into stainless steel containers. The containers are eventually supposed to be shipped to a repository, such as the moribund Yucca Mountain, for permanent disposal. As for the decontaminated salt solution, it is mixed with grout at the nearby Saltstone Production Facility for disposal onsite.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is planning one of its occasional business opportunities forums via Zoom in about two weeks.
The session is set to commence at 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on June 24 and should wrap up in less than 90 minutes, according to a notice posted Monday on a federal procurement website. There will be a discussion on the status of current and upcoming procurement opportunities at the $7-billion-plus Office of Environmental Management (EM).
To pre-register and receive the connection details, email Anne Marie Bird of DOE’s Cincinnati-based Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center by June 22 at [email protected]. Bird is also the EM contract person for any advance questions about the forum.
“We are cordially inviting you to join us for this virtual forum to learn about the latest news on doing business with the Office of Environmental Management,” according to the online notice.
