As the world celebrates Women’s History Month, this week’s (March 14) Gone Fission Nuclear Report podcast is featuring six women who have risen to the top spot in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) since it was formed more than 30 years ago.
Known as EM-1, the top Environmental Management official oversees the cleanup of aging, contaminated facilities at DOE sites nationwide, many of them dating back to the Manhattan Project in World War II.
Carolyn Huntoon was the first female EM-1, the Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management. She served from 1999 to 2001 and brought to DOE a resume with unmatched credentials. She had also been the first woman Director of the Johnson Space Center and was a driver in bringing women into America’s astronaut corps, including Astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space.
Five other women have held the top EM post among a total of 17 leaders in the intervening 20 years. Four were Senate confirmed, and one served in an acting capacity without Senate confirmation. Together, they have served a total of eight years, or about 40 percent of the total time across those two decades. Here’s the list:
Jessie Hill Roberson, 2001-2004, Senate Confirmed
Ines Triay, 2008-2011, Senate Confirmed
Monica Regalbuto, 2015-2017, Senate Confirmed
Sue Cange, January To June 2017, Acting
Anne Marie White, 2018-2019, Senate Confirmed
“These women played a key role in one of the most challenging environmental cleanup programs in American history,” Gone Fission podcast host Michael Butler said. “At its inception in 1989, the EM program faced a daunting task. The production of more than 1,000 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium and more than 100 metric tons of plutonium resulted in environmental contamination at 107 sites throughout the United States — covering an area equal to the combined
size of Delaware and Rhode Island.”
This contamination included more than 90 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste resulting from the separation of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium produced as a byproduct of uranium enrichment activities. More than 5,000 contaminated facilities needed to be addressed.
Millions of cubic meters of contaminated soil, and billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater, needed to be remediated. In addition, host communities, Tribal Nations, regulators, and others had little information about the extent and complexity of contamination at most DOE sites.
Three decades later, the EM program can report impressive progress as only 15 DOE sites remain on the list for environmental cleanup.
The Gone Fission Nuclear Report covers the latest developments in environmental cleanup across the Department of Energy (DOE) complex. DOE is now engaged in the largest environmental remediation program in history, cleaning up nuclear production sites across the U.S. that were used to support national security missions for 75 years.
“Some of the work on these sites dates back to the super-secret Manhattan Project, a national priority to develop the first atomic bomb that helped end World War II,” Butler said. “Cleanup of these sites is a multi-decade effort, requiring thousands of trained professionals and highly skilled crafts people with budgets in the billions of dollars.”
