Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) vice president Joe Legare has left his post with the legacy cleanup contractor at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to return to corporate parent Huntington Ingalls Industries.
N3B’s president and general manager, Kim Lebak, mentioned the change Thursday night during a public meeting by the contractor and DOE’s Environmental Management field office at Los Alamos. “He has been on the project for five years … and I know he will be very helpful at our parent company operation,” Lebak said. A nuclear Navy veteran, Legare has worked at Huntington Ingalls and its affiliates since 2006, following more than 13 years in management posts with the DOE.
Brad Smith, the N3B engineering and nuclear safety director, is now acting vice president at N3B, Lebak said.
Michael Mikolanis, the top Department of Energy cleanup official at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said Thursday he and his wife were sickened by breathing too much carbon monoxide in their home following a Christmas trip to visit family in South Carolina.
After a couple of weeks of suffering from a mystery illness, neither COVID-19 nor the flu, a dangerous carbon monoxide problem was found during a routine inspection of the house’s air handling system, said Mikolanis, who heads DOE’s Environmental Management field office. The couple was “almost incapacitated” and “not thinking very clearly” during the January sickness, the Environmental Management boss said.
A heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) technician said he was “required by law to turn off my furnace … it was filling up my house with carbon monoxide and we didn’t know it,” said Mikolanis. To fix the problem, a replacement furnace was then installed within a couple of days, Mikolanis said. The DOE official made his remarks as part of a “safety share” during a public meeting on Los Alamos nuclear cleanup. “I’m not doing an advertisement for the HVAC systems in New Mexico,” but get your systems inspected regularly, Mikolanis said. The HVAC system likely broke during the South Carolina trip, he added.
Mina Golshan is joining the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Waste Services Board as a non-executive director and chair of its environmental safety and security panel effective in June, the board announced last week in a press release.
Golshan is a physicist who has been working in the nuclear field for more than 20 years and is currently head of safety, assurance and licensing at the EDF Sizewell-C nuclear station in Suffolk, England, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Golshan is replacing Neil Baldwin, who has announced his upcoming departure at the end of his term after five years working with the Nuclear Waste Services Board, according to the release.
