Intermountain Energy Summit
ECA Staff
 
The Second Annual Intermountain Energy Summit will be held on August 18-19 in Idaho Falls, ID.  Featured speakers include Idaho Sen. James Risch, Rep. Mike Simpson who chairs the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy John Kotek, and a host of other experts and stakeholders throughout government, industry, and academia. More information on the Summit and instructions on how to register can be found here.
 
 
Dr. Regalbuto Nomination Hearing
ECA Staff
 
Tomorrow, June 16, at 10:00am EDT, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will consider the nomination of Dr. Monica Regalbuto to be Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management.  Dr. Regalbuto was nominated last year but the full Senate failed to act on her nomination.  A live webcast of the hearing will be on the Committee’s page here.
 
 
Hanford Advisory Board says proposed spending levels inadequate
Tri-City Herald
June 13, 2015
LINK
 
The Department of Energy appears to plan to significantly underfund Hanford cleanup in budgets being set now, said the Hanford Advisory Board in a letter of advice to DOE and regulators.
 
The board discussed the proposed annual budgets for the next two years for the Hanford nuclear reservation at its meeting Wednesday and Thursday in Richland, reaching consensus on what it would like to see funded as representatives of a broad range of constituencies, including local government, the tribes, the public, the work force, environmental groups and local business.
 
The board acknowledged that after years of budgets failing to provide enough money to meet environmental cleanup requirements at Hanford, it is almost impossible to develop budgets for fiscal 2016 and 2017 that meet them now.
 
“Current budgets fall far short of meeting those agreements (between DOE and the state of Washington) and place both the environment and public safety at ever increasing risk,” the board said in its letter.
 
DOE said when it opened public discussion on the fiscal 2017 budget in late April that the budget would need to double from its present level to meet environmental cleanup requirements.
 
DOE has released little detail on half of the fiscal 2017 budget for Hanford, covering the work to manage the tank farms where 56 million gallons of radioactive waste are held in underground tanks and the vitrification plant under construction to treat the waste for disposal.
 
The plans and deadlines for that work are being discussed in federal court, as DOE has been unable to meet deadlines set in a 2010 court-enforced consent decree.
 
The court process excludes public input or review and may result in funding decisions that vary widely from advisory board and public priorities, the board said.
 
It seems reasonable to expect that the Hanford budgets will change significantly after a new court order is issued, the board said.
 
The board is concerned that the fiscal 2017 budget proposal, which had limited information shared publicly, does not appear to include money to retrieve waste from two problematic tanks.
 
One of 28 newer double-shell tanks, Tank AY-102, has waste leaking between its shells, and Tank T-111, one of 149 older single-shell tanks, is leaking waste into the ground.
 
The board also is pressing for new tanks to be built to securely hold waste because of delays in getting the waste treated for disposal. The plan is to turn much, if not all, of it into a stable glass form at the vitrification plant. The soonest it might start treating any of the waste is 2022.
 
Elsewhere at Hanford, the board is concerned about a loss of momentum to finish up some of the remaining and challenging cleanup work along the Columbia River.
 
Money for the 324 Building cleanup needs to be given a higher priority in fiscal 2016, the board agreed. For work other than at the tank farms and vitrification plant, DOE listed projects by priority to show which ones it would proceed with depending on how much money was available.
 
Contamination in the soil after a leak decades ago from the building is so radioactive that it would be fatal within minutes of human contact. The contamination appears to be fairly stable now. The building acts as a shield from its radiation and prevents precipitation from reaching it.
 
But the water lines supporting the building’s aged fire suppression system have a history of failing and water could cause contamination to migrate toward the river if another failure were to go undetected, the board said.
 
For years the board has followed the development of plans to clean up the waste, including containers of liquid radioactive waste, dumped down pipes buried vertically in the ground in the 618-10 Burial Ground north of Richland.
 
The board is encouraged that casings have been driven into the ground around the pipes and that trained crews are waiting for direction from DOE to start retrieving the waste with less than a year and a half remaining under Washington Closure Hanford’s extended contract.
 
“If the crews are not given the direction to proceed, they will be disbanded,” the board said. “All of the money spent to plan the work and train the workers will be wasted.”
 
Once the 618-10 Burial Ground is cleaned up, work should start on the similar 618-11 Burial Ground near Energy Northwest’s commercial nuclear power plant on leased Hanford land, the board said.
 
“We should move crews from one to another right on top of each other,” said board member Shelley Cimon. “We have the trained workforce.”
 
Having the 324 Building and the 618-10 and -11 burial grounds cleaned up by a legal deadline in 2018 is not possible, said Dennis Faulk, Hanford program manager for the Environmental Protection Agency, a Hanford regulator.
 
Cleanup of the 618-11 Burial Ground could be finished anytime between 2020 to 2047 under current information from DOE, he said. He encouraged the board to include its wishes on the 618-11 Burial Ground in its letter of advice if it wanted the work done sooner rather than later.
 
The board asked that money be available to remove cesium and strontium capsules now held underwater in a central Hanford pool as soon as possible. The capsules account for a third of the radioactivity at Hanford.
 
“In the event of a major earthquake, which is now recognized as possible, these wastes could be exposed to air causing a massive radiation release,” the board said.
 
The board also made a pitch for adequate funding for its own meetings and other public meetings.
 
The board might have to reduce its number of all-member meetings from five to four under the proposed fiscal 2016 budget. It already has stopped holding meetings outside the Tri-Cities because of continued budget reductions, it said.
 
Decreasing the board’s budget works against DOE’s stated goal to increase transparency and receive public opinion, the board said.
 
The board also wants DOE to resume annual State of the Site meetings that allow the public to ask questions of senior managers of DOE and its regulators and provide input on priorities and public concerns.
 
The fiscal 2017 budget recommendations remain open for public comment through June 15. A link to more information is posted on the rotating banner at www.hanford.gov. Comments may be emailed to 2017HanfordBudget@rl.gov or mailed to U.S. Department of Energy; Attn: 2017 Budget; P.O. Box 550, A7-75; Richland, WA 99352.
 
 
Report blasts agency's oversight of contractors managing nuke labs
Security Info Watch
June 12, 2015
LINK
 
A Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday slams the National Nuclear Security Administration's oversight of contractors who are paid billions of public dollars to manage the nation's nuclear weapons facilities.
 
The report recites a litany of ongoing failures to properly oversee private contractors at eight nuclear facilities, including those managing Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
 
The report's authors found that the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Energy, lacked enough qualified staff members to oversee contractors, and it lacked guidelines for evaluating its contractors.
 
Don Hancock of the Southwest Information and Research Center, a government watchdog group, said Wednesday the report shows that "better oversight requires more oversight from qualified NNSA or DOE employees who have that job, and incentives to make things work."
 
The GAO, which investigates federal agencies as requested by Congress, said the NNSA shortcomings stem from a 4-year-old experiment in reducing "overly prescriptive and burdensome" federal oversight of contractors by letting the private companies self-report their problems. NNSA staff told the GAO, however, that contractors aren't always as self-critical as they need to be in assessing their own performance.
 
The so-called "contractor assurance system" isn't convincing the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee that the management of the nation's nuclear facilities is improving.
 
Committee leaders from both major political parties pointed to a leaking container of radioactive waste from Los Alamos that shut down a nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad last year as one of the incidents that prove the NNSA and the Department of Energy have a long way to go in improving oversight of private contractors.
 
"For nearly two decades, this committee has uncovered management challenges facing the DOE complex involving contractor oversight. For the past five years, DOE has experimented with a new approach to contractor oversight that is not ready for prime time," committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., said in a statement. "We saw the results of this experiment at the Y-12 security breach in Tennessee three years ago and more recently in oversight failures that led to a costly incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant site [in New Mexico]."
 
The Y-12 breach occurred when three anti-nuclear activists, including an 82-year-old nun, slipped past security personnel and tagged buildings at a uranium enrichment facility before they were finally arrested. The incident unveiled "troubling displays of ineptitude," the GAO said.
 
LANL is managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security LLC, a consortium of companies including Bechtel National, the University of California, Babcock and Wilcox Technical Services and URS Energy. The consortium was fined by the New Mexico Environment Department for the lab's role in shipping a mislabeled waste container that erupted at WIPP, causing the radiation leak.
 
The lab also faces a fine from the Department of Energy for failing to track unidentified "classified" matter that disappeared after it was supposed to have been shipped to the Nevada National Security Site.
 
Wednesday's report points out that the NNSA's central headquarters stopped reviewing how field offices, like the one in Los Alamos, were overseeing contractors. The 90-page document also says the NNSA failed to finish a review of staffing levels in 2013 at the request of employees.
 
Currently, the agency has 1,600 employees in its Washington, D.C., office, in field offices and at a complex in Albuquerque to oversee the performance of 34,000 contract employees.
 
"An agency that is more than 90 percent privatized, with barely enough federal employees to sign the checks and answer the phones, is never going to be able to properly oversee billion-dollar nuclear facilities of vast complexity and danger," said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group.
 
In a letter to the GAO, NNSA Administrator Frank G. Klotz concurred with the report's findings and said the agency will work to address the issues.
 
Wednesday's report is the latest GAO finding of problems in the public-private partnership between the federal government and companies paid to oversee the nation's nuclear weapons programs.
 
In 1990, the GAO found the Department of Energy insufficiently oversaw contractors. Again in 2000, the GAO put the Department of Energy's contract management program on a "high risk" list for "fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement." The NNSA was established that year to reduce such risks.
 
In 2013, the GAO kept the NNSA on the high-risk list but narrowed the problems down to the environmental management program for nuclear waste and to major contractors. Wednesday's report found the agency had made little or no progress in addressing those problems.
 
The GAO report reviewed worker safety measures, construction management, business operations, emergency management and security, among other areas.
 
Hancock said the report doesn't address the significant problem of how the NNSA evaluates contractor performance tied to millions of dollars in compensation. "Performance measures should be made publicly available as they are developed each year," he said, "and the performance awards and their bases should be more easily available to the public."
 
The Government Accountability Office report is available at www.gao.gov/assets/680/670721.pdf.
 
 
Feds taking comments on proposed nuclear shipments to Idaho
Idaho State Journal
June 12, 2015
LINK
 
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Federal officials say they're taking public comments on a plan to ship two loads of spent nuclear fuel rods to eastern Idaho for research.
 
The U.S. Department of Energy in a statement says comments will be taken through July 13 on its draft of whether more environmental analysis is needed.
 
The 60-page document can be viewed at the agency's website under the Idaho Operations Office, Public Involvement Opportunities.
 
The agency has proposed sending up to 220 pounds of nuclear fuel rods to the Idaho National Laboratory.
 
The agency in a statement Thursday says no decision has been made yet concerning the destination of the proposed shipments.
 
Scientists say the fuel rods are needed for research, but opponents contend allowing the shipments will bring additional waste to Idaho for storage.
 
 
House panel calls out nuclear officials over repeated failures
Albuquerque Journal
June 13, 2015
LINK
 
Members of a U.S. House panel said Friday that they are frustrated with decades of security and safety lapses at some of the laboratories, manufacturing facilities and other sites that make up the nation’s nuclear complex.
 
The lawmakers, during a hearing in Washington, D.C., pushed top officials with the U.S. Energy Department and the National Nuclear Safety Administration for details on how the agencies plan to revamp oversight of the contractors that run the facilities.
 
The hearing focused on oversight failures that contributed to a 2014 radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that forced the indefinite closure of the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository, near Carlsbad in southern New Mexico. Investigators determined that a container of waste improperly packed at Los Alamos National Laboratory ruptured, allowing radiation to escape.
 
The radiation leak at WIPP is just the latest in a long string of security and safety breaches. Members of the panel pointed to the disappearance of classified computer disks at Los Alamos in 2004 and the 2012 break-in at one of the nation’s most secure sites by an 82-year-old nun and fellow activists.
 
In the most recent case, a clerical error is partly to blame for workers packing drums of waste produced from plutonium processing at Los Alamos with organic cat litter. That was despite guidance that called for an inorganic material to be used to absorb the moisture inside the containers.
 
“This has been a recurrent theme that comes up over and over again,” said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, who has been on the subcommittee for more than 10 years. “It is important to get this right and get this solved. We are talking about the nation’s nuclear secrets.”
 
After the radiation leak, National Nuclear Safety Administration and Energy Department offices have been reorganized, and Energy Department officials said they’re working on improving their oversight team at headquarters.
 
Officials reiterated their commitment to making improvements, but lawmakers said they had little confidence because lessons had yet to be learned from past problems. Some described the agencies’ records as alarming.
 
As for WIPP, an Energy Department official acknowledged during the hearing that it could take several years before full operations resume and that the final price tag is unknown. Preliminary estimates have pegged the cost of resuming some operations at more than $500 million.
 
U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., said taxpayers are on the hook for the mistakes made at Los Alamos and WIPP. Collins said he wanted to know why no one was fired.
 
Had something like that happened in the private sector, he said, those responsible would have lost their jobs and the contractor would have been sued to recoup the cost of the damages. Collins said simply reducing the term of the contract doesn’t go far enough to hold the lab manager accountable or address the systemic problems that have plagued the lab.
 
Collins, a businessman, said his biotechnology company works with infectious diseases and other bioterrorism materials. “We don’t make mistakes, because we have people in charge who know what they’re doing. Clearly that can’t be said for your agency,” Collins told the panel of federal officials.
 
The closure of WIPP has delayed the cleanup of legacy waste like contaminated gloves, tools and clothing from decades of bomb-making across the nuclear complex. In its 15 years of operation, the nuclear dump received shipments from more than 20 sites as part of the Energy Department’s multibillion-dollar-a-year cleanup program.
 
 
Dorothy McKibbin: The Manhattan Project's Secret Weapon
Atlas Obscura
June 12, 2015
LINK
 
Oppenheimer. Fermi. Feynman. Groves. When most people think (or read) about who was behind the American effort to make the atomic bomb, these are the names that often come to the fore. But there is one lady who tied all of the scientists, technicians, and other figures together during their time at Los Alamos.
 
That woman was Dorothy McKibbin, the Atomic Secretary, the woman who kept the Manhattan Project’s secrets. Known as the Gatekeeper of Los Alamos, and later the First Lady of Los Alamos, Dorothy McKibbin worked as the secretary at the 109 East Palace office where those destined for top secret work on “The Hill” would have to check in.
 
During her 20 years in the position, McKibbin would rub elbows with nearly all those that entered Los Alamos to build one of the most destructive weapons ever created.
 
McKibbin’s life before she joined the Manhattan Project is almost as fascinating as what she did after. Dorothy Scarritt was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1897, graduating Smith College in Massachusetts 1919 before travelling the world with her father, visiting Alaska, Europe, South America. Unfortunately, in 1926, McKibbin came down with what she described in a 1965 interview with journalist Stephane Groueff as “a touch of TB” (the interview is available to listen to in its entirety via the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s terrific “Voices of the Manhattan Project”). To get well, McKibbin traveled to the Sun Mountain rehab facility in Santa Fe, New Mexico where it was thought that the dry air, sunny weather, and lovely desert surrounds would help to heal tuberculosis sufferers. While she recovered, McKibbin became enchanted by the hot climate and pueblo culture of the area, taking up drawing and pottery while she was on bed rest. The treatments worked, and within a year she was cured of the disease, but had been infected with something that would come to define her later life: a love for the city of Santa Fe.
 
Shortly after leaving Sun Mountain, she married investment banker Joseph McKibbin, and the young couple relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1930 they had a son, Kevin, and the family looked to have a bright future ahead of them. Tragically, Joseph passed away from Hodgkins disease just a year after Kevin was born, leaving he and Dorothy to move on alone. Instead of moving back to her family home in Kansas City, McKibbin and her 11-month-old son moved back to Santa Fe.
 
Back in the city she loved, McKibbin took a job as a part-time bookkeeper for the Spanish-Indian Trading Company, a small business that represented local Native American artisans, selling their arts and crafts. McKibbin spent the next decade in the city, raising her son as a single mother, while she acquainted herself with the local landscape, becoming an involved member of the community and regular expert on Santa Fe.
 
As America entered World War II, the tourism economy in Santa Fe dwindled and the Spanish-Indian Trading Company went under in 1943. However at the same time, the U.S. military had chosen nearby Los Alamos for their top secret Manhattan Project, which brought all sorts of new strangers to Santa Fe. One of these strangers was Robert Oppenheimer, who would become the father of the atomic bomb.
 
After the trading company closed, McKibbin looked at taking a bank job despite her hatred of arithmetic. She went so far as to take a civil service exam for the position, which she flunked. Undaunted she took the test a second time and passed, tentatively accepting a job as a loan officer. Around this same time, an acquaintance she had met while recovering from tuberculosis, Joe Stevenson, had returned to Santa Fe as the manager of the mysterious “Project Y” that was bringing all sorts of new people to the city. Stevenson asked McKibbin if she would like to take a job as a secretary. When she asked him what the job would entail, and who it was for, he simply said he couldn’t tell her, but he did give her 24 hours to decide if she wanted the position. The next day McKibbin went to lunch at the popular La Fonda hotel with some friends and she saw Stevenson standing with another outsider associated with the project. Still undecided about taking the mystery job, she went to say hi, and that’s when she first met Robert Oppenheimer. McKibbin described the meeting in that aforementioned 1965 interview:
 
“I saw Joe Stevenson. The time was running out when I'd say yes or no. I saw him with Dwayne Muncy, the man in the brown gabardine suit. We were just chatting. I saw a man approach us from the lobby. […] He had on a trench coat and a porkpie hat. He walked sort of on the balls of his feet. I think that he had a pipe in his mouth. He stopped. The two men introduced me. I did not get the name. I wouldn't have known anything about it if I had. He said about five words to them, and then he turned and went on. I turned to Joe Stevenson and said, ‘I'll take the job.’ [...]  I thought that anything with which a man of that magnetism was connected was what I would enjoy.”
 
And with that, the Gatekeeper of Los Alamos was born. McKibbin began working as the receptionist for Stevenson’s wife, before becoming the secretary for Stevenson himself. Her office was located at 109 East Palace, one of the Santa Fe office spaces that Oppenheimer had rented out under the name, “Mr. Bradley.” Stevenson told her not to ask questions and set her loose organizing the droves of people and equipment that would pass through the Santa Fe checkpoint on their way to the secret Los Alamos facility.
 
Every worker, scientist, supply truck, and shipment had to pass through 109 East Palace to receive badges and get clearance to head to and from the hill, and McKibbin was the warm, smiling face that greeted each of them. As Alexandra Levy, Project Director at the Atomic Heritage Foundation describes it, no principal from the project could travel without checking in with McKibbin—even people like Enrico Fermi, the physicist, had to hand over his Los Alamos badge before moving between Manhattan Project sites. “So she basically controlled a lot of the movement,” Levy says, “She was pretty powerful in the context of the Manhattan Project.”
 
The administrative office at 109 East Palace became one of the hearts of the Manhattan Project, not just processing the comings and goings of the workers, but handling food and clothing rations for the families and staff. But beyond her expert administrative wrangling, McKibbin acted as a comforting presence to the civilians and military men who would arrive to the office with little-to-no idea why they had been transferred there. At the height of the project in 1943 and 1944, military “taxis” were leaving every hour on the hour to bring them to and from Los Alamos, and McKibbin’s office was fielding over 60 people a day and over hundred phone calls.
 
McKibbin’s knowledge of the local sites and culture made her indispensable among the workers at Los Alamos who turned to her for insight on where to visit and relax when they weren’t toiling away on their secret bomb. “Hers was the first friendly face that they saw, and many of the people who remember McKibbin talked about how polite she was, how friendly she was, how she helped put them at ease after their long trip,” says Levy. McKibbin even opened up her personal garden to multiple weddings for couples that met on the project.
 
Of course as the wall between the top secret world of Los Alamos and the civilian world of Santa Fe, McKibbin also acted as defense against spies. While just about every inch of Santa Fe from nightclub to newstand was watched by plain-clothes Army intelligence agents, 109 East Palace was known as being the point office for Project Y, so it of course became a target for espionage. McKibbin recalled in that same 1965 interview, reporting people who would show up asking for passes or information. She even came to know famed Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, who she recalled was often asked to babysit for families on the base. 
 
Even with all of her work at 109 East Palace, McKibbin also took the time to socialize with the members of the Manhattan Project and even struck up a fond relationship with Oppenheimer himself who came to greatly respect her for her work and attitude. They both had a seemingly overwhelming connection to the rugged lands around Santa Fe and Los Alamos. McKibbin was known to attend parties at his house in Los Alamos where the other scientists and their families would mingle. 
 
Yet for all of her access, as a civilian employee without a top secret security clearance, McKibbin was never made aware of what they were working on up on the hill. Of course by 1945, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, McKibbin had been able to piece together what they had been working on.
 
McKibbin continued working at the 109 East Palace office long after the research on the bomb was finished, as Los Alamos and the Manhattan Projects slowly came to light. She operated the office until 1963, processing people as they came to Santa Fe and Los Alamos to live and work, helping them find housing and get settled.
 
When the office finally closed McKibbin retired for good. The Atomic Secretary never moved out of Santa Fe, though, staying in the city and becoming as active and a vibrant member of both the local arts and historic preservation community, as she was while working at 109 East Palace. Her devotion to the city and the Manhattan Project she was given the title of “First Lady of Los Alamos,” as well as being deemed a “Living Treasure of Santa Fe.” She had left as big an impression on Santa Fe as it had made on her life.