President Joe Biden’s announced lifting of the national COVID-19 pandemic emergency status in May will likely result in little noticeable change in daily operations for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, a spokesperson said this week.
The cleanup office has said for months that most employees are at their pre-pandemic workstations most of the time although bosses have considerable leeway to grant telecommuting arrangements. “I do not have numbers or percentages but did confirm that all EM [Environmental Management] offices including the Washington D.C. headquarters offices are open with maximum telework flexibilities to all current telework eligible employees,” the spokesperson said via email Wednesday. “EM employees continue to perform mission critical functions and operations,” the spokesperson added.
Contractors doing remediation field work have been back onsite for more than a year, according to DOE. The Biden administration made the announcement Monday and the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday to end the COVID-19 crisis policy immediately, according to published reports.
The chief operating officer for the Amentum-led cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, Tom Dieter, will retire March 31 and be succeeded by critical projects director Kent Fortenberry, the contractor said Thursday.
“We are grateful for [Dieter’s] leadership in the company maintaining a strong safety performance in our first year,” said United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR) President and CEO Ken Rueter in a press release.
Dieter has more than 30 years of management experience around the DOE nuclear weapons complex, according to his online bio. He was formerly CEO of the cleanup project at the Idaho National Laboratory for CH2M, which is now a subsidiary of Jacobs and a partner in UCOR. Honeywell is also a partner in UCOR. Fortenberry will become chief operations officer after logging about four decades in operation and cleanup of both government and commercial nuclear facilities, UCOR said in the release.
Mark Bollinger is now the acting manager for the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management announced earlier in January that Carlsbad manager Reinhard Knerr is moving to the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office to become the deputy manager helping to oversee the former gaseous diffusion plant sites in Ohio and Kentucky.
Knerr also starts his new post this week. Bollinger, the No. 2 guy at Carlsbad for nearly two years, had previously been second-in-command at the DOE Fermi Site Office in Illinois, since 2007.
Before joining DOE, Bollinger did research at Proctor and Gamble and also was a regulator for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, according to the bio posted on the Carlsbad field office website.
After skipping a couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual controlled deer hunts returned to the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina during December, and 261 deer were killed, according to the site’s top fed.
“Finally we did the deer hunts in December,” Michael Budney, who heads DOE’s Office of Environmental Management at Savannah River, told the Citizens Advisory Board during a meeting last week.
There were 261 deer, 38 wild hogs and eight coyotes killed during the annual event that was canceled for the prior two years due to the pandemic.
Since 1965 the government has held annual deer hunts, typically half-day affairs with dates in November and December, to cull the populations of deer and certain other animals, such as wild pigs, roaming the 150,000 acres of federal land within the Savannah River Site complex along the South Carolina-Georgia border.
