Waste Control Specialists has filed a permit renewal application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, company president David Carlson told Exchange Monitor this week at the National Cleanup Workshop in Arlington, Va.
The renewal paperwork includes the original application and subsequent amendments, with Texas recently. The current application does not expire until September 2024, but Texas requires permit renewal papers be filed a year in advance, Carlson said.
The commercial facility in Andrews County, Texas offers treatment, storage and disposal of Class A, B and C low-level radioactive waste and other hazardous material. The facility started receiving waste more than a decade ago, Carlson said.
A Veolia Nuclear Solutions subsidiary has hired Bob Miklos, a retired nuclear waste manager at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory as VNS Federal Services’ executive vice president of program assurance, the company announced last week.
Miklos will help Veolia Nuclear Solutions (VNS) target opportunities for its GeoMelt and similar technology across DOE’s nuclear weapons complex, VNS said in a Sept. 6 press release.
Last December VNS opened its second commercial-scale GeoMelt unit, designed to convert small batches of low-level radioactive waste into glass form at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas.Miklos recently retired from the Idaho National Laboratory after 23 years there working for managing contractor Battelle Energy Alliance. Miklos managed facilities for spent fuel at the Materials and Fuels Complex.
Karen McGinnis, who ran the Department of Energy’s Hammer Federal Training Center at the Hanford Site in Washington for about 25 years, has died at age 71, according to a Sept. 6 article that appeared originally in the Tri-Cities Herald.
McGinnis retired from the training center, now run by Leidos-led Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, in 2018. She was praised upon her retirement in a House of Representatives floor speech by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.).
“Karen has guided HAMMER to its status as an industry recognized leader in safety and health training featuring one of the most multi-faceted training facilities in the world,” the Metals Trades Department of the AFL-CIO said in 2017.
As a safeguard against wildfires, crews for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico started to thin out the forest in certain areas of Rendija Canyon, lab officials announced last week.
The Rendija Canyon Wildland Fire Fuels Reduction and Defensible Space Project, which should be finished in November, will create a “fuel break” across 135 acres of DOE-owned land near Rendija Canyon Road, according to the Sept. 6 press release.
“The thinning will consist of removing pre-selected vegetation, brush, down woody material and other accelerants in a mosaic pattern,” Rich Nieto, who leads the lab’s emergency management division, said in the release. The end result will be a more open landscape that should curb the intense heat for firefighters, helping them to establish a foothold to fight a wildfire, Nieto said. The affected area includes the Los Alamos Sportsmen’s Club range area, the powerline utility corridor and an area south of the archery range in the section north of Barranca Mesa, according to the release.
