Funeral services were scheduled for Nov. 9 at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., for a submarine officer who had a second career in the civilian nuclear world as a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staffer for most of the last decade.
Captain John Pasko (Ret.) died Sept. 7, according to a post published Sunday by the local Capital Gazette, which did not list a cause of death. He was 64. Pasko left the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) in 2019 after ten-and-a-half years with the federal government’s independent health and safety watchdog for Department of Energy nuclear-weapon sites.
At DNFSB, Pasko was the lead for safety oversight at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and also held the title of lead for the nuclear materials processing and stabilization group, according to his LinkedIn profile. He started at the board as a senior engineer in 2008.
In 2001, during the final third of an almost 30-year career in the Navy, Pasko received a live-lung transplant from some of his colleagues in the service, according to family photographs shared online by the Department of Defense. In 1997, a year after its commissioning, Pasko commanded the USS Wyoming, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine.
The Department of Energy has selected one new member and reappointed five current members to the Paducah Citizens Advisory Board, the agency said recently in a press release.
Eric Butterbaugh, an analyst for a computer firm, is the new appointee and will serve a two-year term.
The five incumbent members receiving a new two-year term are: Chair Don Barger, a retired public school teacher; Phillip Brown a Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant retiree; Victoria Caldwell, who works as a social media coordinator; William Murphy, a retired professor from the University of Kentucky and Blake Summarell who works as a financial advisor, according to last week’s release.
The Citizens Advisory Board, composed of up to 15 people from Western Kentucky and Southern Illinois, is a federally chartered board that provides advice to DOE on environmental cleanup and future use of the Paducah Site. The members can serve up to three consecutive two-year terms, DOE said.
The board also has liaisons from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Kentucky and meets the third Thursday of most months at 5:30 p.m. Central Time. The meetings are being held virtually nowadays due to COVID-19 and the most recent one was Sept. 16, according to the advisory board website.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, designed and built by Virginia-based Parsons, was among the three finalists for Project of the Year 2021 by the Project Management Institute, Parsons said in a Thursday press release.
The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) is one of two runners-up to the winning project, the international project management association, said on the awards section of its website. The award winner is a Foreign Affairs Security Training Center built in Virginia for the U.S. Department of State. The other project in the final three is a super computer and data center built for Saudi Aramco, the petroleum and natural gas company, to help it track and evaluate seismic data that could affect exploration.
As for SWPF, it represents “the last major piece of the Savannah River Site liquid waste processing system,” the Institute said. The facility separates “the highly radioactive constituents for treatment via vitrification from the predominately low radioactivity salts,” the latter of which is disposed of on-site. “Removing this salt waste is a major step toward closing the Site’s 43 remaining high-level waste tanks and eliminating the most significant environmental risk to the region,” the institute said.
In 2002 the DOE selected Parsons, under a contract now valued at $2.3-billion and set to expire in April 2022, to construct and commission the SWPF, according to a DOE procurement chart. As of July, the SWPF has processed more than 1 million gallons of tank waste at Savannah River.
