EMAB Meeting May 31, 2012
EM Risk and Cleanup Decision Making Presentation by Mark Gilbertson
(Includes slide on CRESP OR Prioritization)
EM Risk and Cleanup Decision Making Presentation by Mark Gilbertson
(Includes slide on CRESP OR Prioritization)
DOE EM ORGANIZATIONAL CHART
Hanford
Event: PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD ON PROPOSED CLEANUP PLAN
TO ADDRESS CONTAMINATED GROUNDWATER IN HANFORD’S CENTRAL AREA (Hanford Area 200-UP-1 OU).
30-day public
comment period on a Proposed Plan to clean up contaminated groundwater in the
200 UP-1 Groundwater Operable Unit (OU) located under the central part of the
Hanford Site, about 20 miles north of Richland, Washington. The Proposed Plan
describes the proposed cleanup options and identifies the preferred cleanup
alternative.
Time: July 17, 2012 – August 16, 2012
See
Fact sheet for a summary of plan and choices of action “Proposed
cleanup plan to address contaminated groundwater in Hanford’s central area”
========================================================================
WA state fines DOE over missed Hanford
deadline
Published: July 19, 2012 By Tri-City Herald
RICHLAND — Washington state has fined the
Department of Energy $5,000 after it missed a deadline to negotiate a schedule
related to secondary waste at the Hanford vitrification plant. “The amount of
the penalty isn’t large, but it emphasizes the state’s expectation that DOE
honor its commitments at Hanford,” said John Price, who supervises the legally
binding Tri-Party Agreement for the Washington State Department of Ecology’s
Nuclear Waste Program. The state is authorized by the Tri-Party Agreement to
issue a penalty of up to $5,000 for the first week after a missed deadline and
$10,000 per week after that until it is met.
DOE had until June 30 to complete negotiations on schedules for
designing and building facilities to treat secondary wastes created as the
vitrification plant glassifies up to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste
now held in underground tanks. DOE requested a change in the deadline, but gave
no firm date for restarting discussions, according to the state. The state of
Washington filed a lawsuit against DOE in 2008 for missed deadlines to retrieve
radioactive waste held in 149 leak-prone underground tanks and to complete
construction of the vitrification plant. The secondary waste milestone was
included in a 2010 settlement of the lawsuit. DOE will continue to work with
the state to reach a mutually agreeable outcome on the issue, said DOE
spokeswoman Lori Gamache.
=============================================================================================
First of Hanford’s Highly Radioactive
Sludge Moved Away from River- July 13, 2012
RICHLAND, Wash. – Workers have started moving
highly radioactive material, called sludge, away from the Columbia River,
marking a significant milestone in the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s
cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington State. Link.
Video
========================================================================
Vit Plant
employees work 12 million hours without a day-away-from-work injury
Todd A. Nelson,
Bechtel National, Inc., (509) 371-2121
RICHLAND, Wash. —
Employees working on the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant —
better known as the Vit Plant — have worked more than 12 million hours without
a day away from work due to an injury. July 16 marked two years since the last
injury involving a day away from work. MORE
========================================================================
EM CHIEF OF STAFF TO BE DETAILED TO OFFICE OF RIVER
PROTECTION
Candice Trummell,
chief of staff for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental
Management, is set to soon travel to Hanford to take a detail position with
DOE’s Office of River Protection, according to a message DOE cleanup chief
David Huizenga sent to employees yesterday. In her new position, set to go into
effect in mid-to-late August, Trummell will aid ORP in “areas of significant
importance, including the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP)
project replanning, continued safety culture improvements, and communicating
the path forward for resolving the remaining technical issues in completing
WTP,” Huizenga said. Replacing Trummell as acting EM chief of staff will be
Joanne Lorence “Joanne has worked for the Department of Energy for over 20
years and for EM for nearly 4 years. She has broad experience at HQ and in the
field,” Huizenga said, adding, “Joanne’s knowledge, dedication and
collaborative nature will serve the front office well while Candice is on
detail.”
========================================================================
--Hanford
Advisory Board
June 8, 2012 Letter to DOE Re: Final Tank Closure and Waste Management
Environmental Impact Statement
Board
concerned DOE is now indicating that waste not scheduled to be treated in the
LAW Vitrification Facility might be treated by some other process that will be
decided at some later date. This change in direction is of great concern to the
Hanford Advisory Board (HAB or Board). It was not supported by public comment
during the review of the draft TC&WM EIS, and is not supported by the
actual data in the EIS. It is also not supported by the cost analysis in the
Kosson Report1 that demonstrated the alternate approaches to treatment of LAW are
cost-equivalent. Letter
June
8, 2012 Letter to DOE Re: 300 Area RI/FS and Proposed Plan
The
Board finds the 300 Area RI/FS and Proposed Plan documents to be difficult to
digest because they contain excess and unnecessary information, yet
concurrently lack the detail and data that would help the reader understand the
approach and the solution proposed. Letter
June 8, 2012 Letter to DOE Re: Safety Culture at the Waste treatment
and Immobilization Plant
This advice is in response to many reports,
recommendations, investigations, action plans, and implementation plans related
to the WTP that call in to question the WTP’s ability to work safely and
effectively. The Board read reports by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety
Board (DNFSB), the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Health, Safety and
Security (DOE-HSS), and others who have looked into the role safety culture has
played, and found a disconcerting link between the inability of employees to
raise concerns and the existence of unresolved technical issues.
Letter
Oak Ridge
DOE appoints
seven new members to advisory board - July 24, 2012 - The
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently appointed... Story
Larry Kelly selected as new manager of DOE's Oak Ridge Office
Larry Kelly selected as new manager of DOE's Oak Ridge Office
July 19, 2012
- OAK RIDGE, Tenn. – On July 19, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE)
Office of Science named Larry Kelly the new manager of the Oak Ridge Office
(ORO). Kelly most recently served as ORO's acting manager and previously served
as the acting deputy manager and the assistant manager for Environment, Safety
& Health (ES&H). Story
EM Program
Updates: EM, UCOR Quickly Reconcile Oak Ridge Cleanup Contract
by em-hq@em.doe.gov
(DOE Environmental Management)
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. – At a ceremony today, Oak Ridge’s
Environmental Management (EM) program and its prime contractor, URS | CH2M Oak
Ridge, LLC (UCOR), celebrated the completion of the site’s cleanup contract
reconciliation. The newly aligned contract accurately specifies the projects and
activities that the site’s cleanup contractor will perform... For
additional information.
Department
of Energy spokesman Mike Koentop said today that DOE's Oak Ridge office expects
to send a revised version of the Memorandum of Agreement back
to the Signatories either tomorrow or Friday. DOE's hope is to quickly gain the
signatures of the historic preservation groups, wrapping up the agreement (with
mitigation plans for tearing down the historic K-25 building) and paving the
way for contractor to complete demolition of K-25.
DOE approves $511M plan to dispose of U-233
By Frank Munger
Friday, July 13, 2012
OAK RIDGE — The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge office has
received approval to move forward with a new plan to process stocks of fissile
uranium-233 stored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and complete a long-running
project that's now expected to cost $511 million. The new plan
eliminates construction of a special processing building and instead will use
an existing facility at ORNL, Building
2026, which has heavily shielded "hot cells," to perform the work. Story
Savannah River
Site
Citizens
Advisory Board hopes Savannah River Site will not become interim spent fuel
site
By Rob Pavey Wednesday, July 25, 2012 12:13 PM Augusta
Chronicle
Savannah River Site’s many roles should not include interim
storage of spent nuclear fuel, according to a draft resolution under
development by the site’s Citizens Advisory Board. More
SRS plutonium
shipment to New Mexico postponed
By Rob Pave July 25,
2012 Augusta Chronicle
A plan to demonstrate how some of Savannah River Site’s most
contaminated Cold War plutonium waste could be sent to a disposal site in New
Mexico will be postponed for several months.
The first transfer, which was to have occurred the week of
June 25, is part of an effort to ship 5 kilograms of waste plutonium at a time
to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, where
lower-level “transuranic” waste is buried a half-mile beneath the Chihuahuan
Desert. That shipment, however, was postponed after the DOE’s Carlsbad Field
Office rescinded its approval of documents used to define the material. Those
documents are under revision, and the delay is expected to be resolved soon,
said Barbara Smoak, a spokeswoman for SRS contractor Savannah River Nuclear
Solutions.
This is one of the classic security billboards from the World War II
Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge. This photo was reportedly taken on New Year's
Eve, Dec. 31, 1943. View photo
NRC
Nuclear Dump
Dominates NRC Chief’s First Trip to Congress
By - Jul 24, 2012 Bloomberg
The new chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told
Congress the U.S. needs a permanent site to store radioactive waste and
declined to back Republican lawmakers who sought to restart the Yucca Mountain
project. While Allison Macfarlane reiterated that
picking a site wasn’t an NRC task, she said cash remains available to evaluate
Yucca. She estimated the U.S. has spent $8 billion on the project. House
Republicans, who were asking about the slow pace of work, put the
cost at $15 billion. “No matter whether you go direct disposal of spent fuel or
you recycle,” Macfarlane, in office for two weeks, said today at a hearing of
two panels of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in Washington, “you will
need a final repository.” More
A Low-Key
Debut for a New N.R.C. Leader
By Matthew L. Wald
NEW YORK TIMES
Cordial and generally noncommittal, Allison M. Macfarlane,
the new chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, gave her first testimony
before Congress on Tuesday without reiterating some of the positions she has
taken in the past on nuclear waste……..In remarks to reporters after the
hearing, she said, “As a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I
just have to deal with the issues that come before us, and right now, there is
not an issue before us” involving Yucca Mountain.
Fukushima
"Radioactive
Strontium From Fukushima Disaster Found in 10 Prefectures"
via
SEJ RSS Feed by jdavis_sej on
7/26/12 "Radioactive strontium-90
from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has been detected for the
first time in 10 prefectures outside Miyagi and Fukushima, the science ministry
said July 24." Read more
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