The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot plant near Carlsbad, N.M., will carry out a three week maintenance outage from Feb. 27 through March 19, a spokesperson for the transuranic waste disposal site said in a Thursday email.
Plans include upkeep and calibration of ventilation fans as well as testing and balancing underground ventilation, the spokesperson said in response to an Exchange Monitor query. “Normal operations are scheduled for the backshift and weekends during the outage,” the spokesperson said. There are no site-wide power outages planned during the event.
Something that won’t occur yet is replacement of a large electrical substation. “Substations 1 and 3 have been delivered to the site and are still under control of the vendor until installation,” the spokesperson said, adding an agreement must still be finalized with a subcontractor. Prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership last year departed from recent prolonged outages in lieu of several shorter ones.
Edwin Deshong III became deputy manager last month for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Citizens Advisory Board for the federal complex heard Monday.
Deshong’s appointment was cited by his direct boss, Mike Budney, the manager for Savannah River’s Office of Environmental Management, during an advisory board meeting streamed live on youtube.
Deshong has over 30 years of experience in the nuclear weapons complex, most of it with the semi autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. He has previously served as acting deputy field office manager for the DOE nuclear weapons program at Savannah River, according to his DOE biography. Environmental Management’s prior deputy manager at Savannah River, Thomas Johnson Jr., retired last spring following a 30-year career as a fed.
Mark Watson, the city manager of Oak Ridge Tenn., which is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site and the Y-12 National Security Complex, plans to retire in May, he told Exchange Monitor by phone this week.
Watson, age 68, has been Oak Ridge’s city manager since 2010, and told city council last week of his plans to retire on May 5, the Oak Ridger newspaper reported on Jan. 17. Watson has been city manager in eight localities in four states.
While city manager for Oak Ridge, Watson has been active in the Energy Communities Alliance, a Washington, D.C.,-based advocacy organization for communities surrounding DOE sites.
The Department of Energy and its prime contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York planned to continue demolition and dispose of roughly 9,000 tons of waste from the Main Plant Process Building in 2023, the site’s Citizens Task Force heard last week.
Jacobs-led CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley, started its “controlled deconstruction” of the facility in September and has already started shipping away debris by rail, Kelly Wooley, deputy general manager for the contractor, said in a Jan. 18 presentation. The facility is one of the last major structures at the site near Ashford, N.Y. Wooley also said exterior work has been completed on a new guard house at West Valley and the project should be finished this year.
The state-owned West Valley site near Ashford, N.Y., is being cleaned up by DOE and was home to a Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing plant, which operated from 1966 until 1972.
Willis Bixby, Washington, D.C. area nuclear consultant and retired federal agency hand, was appointed to the Veolia Nuclear Solutions Federal Services board of directors, according to a company posting on LinkedIn.
Bixby left the federal government in 1996 after 20 years with the Department of Energy and four years with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Among other things, Bixby served as an assistant deputy secretary in the Office of Environmental Management. He was also a deputy manager at the Hanford Site in Washington state and worked at West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
Bixby ran a DOE Office at Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Pennsylvania following the 1979 partial core meltdown there. During mid-2018, Bixby went back to DOE’s nuclear cleanup office for a time in an advisory role. He has also held management jobs at EnergySolutions and Duratek, according to his LinkedIn profile.
