Effective Jan. 29, longtime federal manager Randy Hendrickson will succeed Jay Mullis as the acting head of regulatory affairs and policy at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Mullis, who has filled the position for many months, will return to his job as manager of the cleanup field office at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, William (Ike) White, Environmental Management senior advisor, said Friday in a staff email viewed by Exchange Monitor. With Mullis’s return to Oak Ridge, Laura Wilkerson, the acting site-office manager, will resume her role as deputy manager.
Hendrickson began his civilian career in 2015 after spending 30 years in the Navy, White said. After retiring as a Rear Admiral, Hendrickson joined the National Nuclear Security Administration where he was associate administrator for management and budget. In 2018 he became DOE’s deputy chief financial officer. Hendrickson joined the DOE cleanup office in early 2021 as the deputy for corporate services.
Alaron Nuclear Services, a Veolia affiliate, said in a Jan. 5 news release it has finished a project to double the rail capacity at its low-level radioactive waste transfer site in Western Pennsylvania.
The Veolia Nuclear Solutions – Federal Services business said completion of the project enables up to 24 rail cars on the Alaron facility, which is a transfer site for debris and soil produced through nuclear decommissioning. The waste is ultimately sent on to low-level disposal sites. The Department of Energy remediation contractor for the West Valley Demonstration Project in Ashford, N.Y., has sent Alaron much debris from its tear-down of a vitrification plant.
The expansion should give waste generators within 500 miles or more access to a cheaper alternative to truck transport for low-level waste disposal, Alaron said in the news release. The Alaron rail facility provides “transloading,” a shipping term that refers to moving goods from one mode of transportation to another. Rising diesel prices and a driver shortage have driven up the cost of hauling waste by truck in recent times, Alaron said in the release.
Months after being ordered back to the bargaining table, parties involved in a COVID vaccination policy lawsuit at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will report on progress to a magistrate judge this month.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jill McCook last week ordered a status report on progress by Jan. 31. U.S. District Court Judge Charles Atchley, Jr. admonished the parties to get back to negotiations in September after they had led the judge to believe a settlement deal was at hand.
A half-dozen employees sued laboratory management contractor UT-Battelle in October 2021 after the mandatory vaccination initially caused them to be placed on unpaid leave.
Kenneth Rueter, CEO of Department of Energy contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge has been appointed to a three-year term on the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry’s board of directors.
United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), a partnership of Amentum, Jacobs, and Honeywell, announced Rueter’s appointment in a Jan. 5 press release. In May 2022 Amentum-led UCOR began a 10-year, $8.2 billion contract to tear down old structures and remediate the nuclear weapons complex site.
The Board of Directors serves as the governing body of the Tennessee Chamber, helping guide its Chamber operations and its annual legislative and policy agenda.
Thomas Mooney, who has held senior jobs in the private sector and at the Department of Energy nuclear cleanup office, has joined Parsons Corp. as business development director for federal energy.
Mooney joined Parsons this month after serving 18 months as strategic account manager for Leidos, according to his LinkedIn profile. Both companies are headquartered in the Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C.
Between 2017 and 2021, Mooney held management posts in the Department of Defense and the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. At Environmental Management, Mooney served as a chief operating officer and chief of staff.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is still working on moving 74 problematic drums of transuranic waste out of Andrews County, Texas, but a DOE official shared no timetable for wrapping up the work during a Thursday presentation to the National Academies.
During a meeting of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Allison MacFarlane, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair who now heads the school of public policy at the University of British Columbia, pressed DOE’s Nicole Nelson-Jean for “any update on the problematic drums” stored since 2014 at Waste Control Specialists’s disposal facility in West Texas.
“That is something we are currently working on,” Nelson-Jean said. The containers, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, share characteristics with those that in February 2014 overheated, ruptured and contaminated underground workings at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. A spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the drums this week.
