ECA Update: August 1, 2012
Published: Wed, 08/01/12
OMB tells agencies it will begin consulting on sequester Jeremy Herb, The Hill July 31, 2012 The memo still said little about specifics -- something lawmakers in Congress are calling for from the administration -- reiterating that "the president remains confident Congress will act" to reverse sequestration.
Lawmakers have criticized the Obama administration, and specifically OMB and the Pentagon, for not planning for the sequester cuts that are five months away. Congress passed a law earlier this month that requires the administration to issue reports on the impact of the $500 billion in cuts to both defense and non-defense spending.
House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) will have acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients appear before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, where he's expected to hear complaints from Republicans that the Obama administration is ignoring the potential cuts.
Zients's memo ahead of the hearing is unlikely to satisfy McKeon's criticisms, as he has said that the cost of sequestration must be known now so that contractors and others can understand what the impact will be.
Zients wrote that agencies should continue normal spending and operations "since more than 5 months remain for Congress to act."
The administration had said earlier this year that it was not planning for the cuts because it wanted Congress to reverse them, but OMB officials have slowly acknowledged they are doing some planning.
Zients told the agencies that OMB would consult with them on the sequestration cuts, writing that the agency will "be holding discussions on these issues with you and your staff over the coming months."
Zients said that they would consult on topics including application to agency accounts and exemptions from sequestration.
He said that the reporting requirements in the congressional bill were unrelated to the implementation of the cuts.
GAO Report: NNSA's Reviews of Budget Estimates and Decisions on Resource Trade-offs Need Strengthening GAO July 31, 2012 The National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) planning, programming, budgeting, and evaluation (PPBE) process provides a framework for the agency to plan, prioritize, fund, and evaluate its program activities. Formal policies guide NNSA and management and operating (M&O) contractors through each of four phases of the agency's PPBE cycle--planning, programming, budgeting, and evaluation. These phases appear to be sequential, but the process is continuous and concurrent because of the amount of time required to develop priorities and review resource requirements, with at least two phases ongoing at any time.
NNSA does not thoroughly review budget estimates before it incorporates them into its proposed annual budget. Instead, NNSA relies on informal, undocumented reviews of such estimates and its own budget validation review process--the formal process for assessing budget estimates. Neither of these processes adheres to Department of Energy (DOE) Order 130.1, which defines departmental provisions for the thoroughness, timing, and documentation of budget reviews. NNSA officials said the agency does not follow the order because it expired in 2003. Nevertheless, the order is listed as current on DOE's website, and a senior DOE budget official confirmed that it remains in effect, although it is outdated in terminology and organizational structure. Additionally, according to NNSA officials, the agency's trust in its contractors minimizes the need for formal review of its budget estimates. GAO identified three key problems in NNSA's budget validation review process. First, this process does not inform NNSA, DOE, Office of Management and Budget, or congressional budget development decisions because it occurs too late in the budget cycle--after the submission of the President's budget to Congress. Second, this process is not sufficiently thorough to ensure the credibility and reliability of NNSA's budget because it is limited to assessing the processes used to develop budget estimates rather than the accuracy of the resulting estimates and is conducted for a small portion of NNSA's budget--approximately 1.5 percent of which received such review in 2011. Third, other weaknesses in this process, such as no formal evaluative mechanism to determine if corrective actions were taken in response to previous findings, limit the process's effectiveness in assessing NNSA's budget estimates.
NNSA uses a variety of management tools to decide on resource trade-offs during the programming phase of the PPBE process. One of these tools, integrated priority lists--which rank program activities according to their importance for meeting mission requirements--is to provide senior managers with an understanding of how various funding scenarios would affect program activities. However, NNSA has weakened its ability to gauge the effects of resource trade-offs. For example, in 2010, NNSA disbanded its Office of Integration and Assessments, created in response to DOE Inspector General and GAO recommendations that NNSA establish an independent analysis unit to perform such functions as reviewing proposals for program activities and verifying cost estimates. NNSA agreed with these recommendations and, in 2009, instituted the office to identify, analyze, and assess options for deciding on resource trade-offs. Without an independent analytical capability, NNSA may have difficulty making the best decisions about what activities to fund and whether they are affordable.
Harry Reid's 'rat' slam shows hard-punching side Darius Dixon and Darren Goode, Politico July 30, 2012 The appointee, a fellow Democrat, is a "treacherous, miserable liar," Reid said in remarks published Monday in The Huffington Post. "A first-class rat." "Unethical, prevaricating ... incompetent."
The tirade against NRC Commissioner William Magwood showed the harsher side of the often genial Reid, a former boxer who has shown a pattern of attacking political adversaries -- including a fellow Democrat or even a president -- and who never forgets a slight.
Monday's remarks are vintage Reid, former Nevada Democratic Party Chairwoman Jill Derby told POLITICO.
"Sen. Reid's from the West and a straight talkin' guy," Derby said. "He's known as a soft-spoken person most of the time, but when he feels strongly about something, he'll say it straight and just as strongly as he feels like it."
In this case, Magwood was one of a chorus of critics who helped pressure the departure of a longtime Reid protégé, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who resigned this spring while under fire from congressional Republicans and all his colleagues on the nuclear agency's board.
The majority leader also accused Magwood of misleading him about his stance on storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- the same issue that once prompted Reid to describe President George W. Bush as "a liar" who "betrayed Nevada" and "betrayed the country."
Reid's comments about Magwood sowed some confusion among people who follow the politics of the nuclear commission and Yucca.
"It's not completely clear what initiated the reaction at this time," said Shawn Whitman, a lobbyist with Kountoupes Consulting, who does work for the Nuclear Energy Institute. "It's a long ways from June 2015" -- when Magwood's term at the NRC would expire -- "but sounds like things may be heating up."
"Rat and liar. ... Them's fightin' words," Whitman said.
Dave Lochbaum, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Nuclear Safety Project, also didn't see the strategic value in Reid's comments and offered something of a defense for Magwood.
"I would imagine that the Senator holds Commissioner Magwood responsible for Chairman Jaczko's departure," he said in an email, adding: "I don't know what Commissioner Magwood did or didn't do in this matter. I know what he's done in my dealings. I have no problems with the Commissioner. He has always been fair in his dealings with me."
Not even Magwood's harshest opponents were entirely happy with Reid's comments.
"Our position on Commissioner Magwood hasn't changed -- his background as a booster of the nuclear power industry should disqualify him for the NRC," said Joe Newman, a spokesman for the Project On Government Oversight, which two years ago urged President Barack Obama against naming Magwood to the commission. "Why didn't Sen. Reid speak up in 2010 when we were fighting to keep Commissioner Magwood from being appointed to the NRC?"
Meanwhile, Reid's words brought an amused reaction from some of his own critics. "Someone needs to talk Harry Reid down from the ledge," read a headline on Glenn Beck's website The Blaze, which called his comments a "thick, smelly stream of hate."
But some close to Reid called it a classic rebuke of someone he thinks betrayed him.
Magwood and the other three NRC commissioners had complained last year to the White House, and later to Congress, that Jaczko was a controlling bully who overstepped his authority and belittled colleagues and employees, especially women. But to Reid, Jaczko was a champion of nuclear safety while Magwood and the other commissioners were undermining him at the behest of the industry.
Magwood didn't respond to POLITICO's requests for comment Monday, and both Jaczko and the NRC's public affairs office declined to respond. Reid's office didn't have much to say about his remarks or what prompted them, other than to say the quotations were accurate.
Magwood, who led the Energy Department's nuclear research program under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, was far from the only Jaczko critic on the commission. But he received the harshest criticism from Reid in Monday's Huffington Post interview.
In the interview, Reid complained that he had expected Magwood to oppose the Yucca project, one of the majority leader's top crusades. Reid said a senior White House aide, presidential counselor Pete Rouse, had assured him as much, and that Magwood himself had promised: "Senator, ... [y]ou don't have to worry about me," The Huffington Post reported.
"The man sat in that chair -- right there -- and lied to me," Reid told the website. "I've never, ever in my life had anyone do that. Never."
Reid went on: "He's a first-class rat. He lied to Rouse, he lied to me, and he had a plan. He is a tool of the nuclear industry. A tool." And: "Magwood was a s--t-stirrer. He did everything he could do to embarrass Greg Jaczko."
Reid also vowed that Magwood "will never be chairman of anything that takes Senate confirmation." But that's not an immediate concern at the NRC, where the term of newly confirmed Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane -- another Yucca Mountain critic -- doesn't expire until next summer.
All four of Jaczko's fellow commissioners signed a letter to the White House last year expressing problems with his management style. But during a subsequent hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in December, Magwood offered the most vivid accounts.
The "most troubling" issue about Jaczko, Magwood said in December, was his "raging verbal assault" of agency staff, particularly against women who have had "personal experience with the chairman's extreme behavior." Magwood also testified that Jaczko had tried to control the flow of information at the NRC so much that it led staff to create an "underground network of individuals who remain loyal to the normal function of the agency."
Reid's latest comments fall into a months-long pattern of jabs he's taken against Jaczko's critics.
When Republican NRC Commissioner Kristine Svinicki's term was coming to a close earlier this year, Reid's office accused her of lying to Congress about work related to Yucca Mountain during her 2007 confirmation hearing. Senate environmental committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer made that accusation as well.
On the other hand, Reid has also taken actions to help soothe the turmoil at the nuclear agency.
Despite Reid's criticisms of Svinicki, Obama nominated her to a new five-year term, and Reid let her confirmation go through as part of a deal pairing her with the incoming Macfarlane.
And even after Jaczko announced his resignation in May, Reid held out the possibility that Jaczko might end up serving out his full term anyway, if only to put Jaczko's critics on edge. "We hope to have a replacement before" Jaczko's term expires in 2013, Reid told reporters, adding, "But if we don't, Greg will be there for the duration and [if] something doesn't work out, he can always be renominated." But the White House nominated Macfarlane three days later.
Officials want to turn World War II nuclear-weapon development sites into national parks Darryl Fears, The Washington Post July 28, 2012 Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory was such a well-kept secret during World War II that most Americans still don't know that it sits off one of busiest highways in the South.
Every year, streams of vacationers whiz by the complex that enriched uranium for America's first atomic bomb project. It's on the way to Great Smoky Mountains National Park -- the most-visited U.S. national park. And every year, right about this time, the city of Oak Ridge, just west of Knoxville on Interstate 40, holds a Secret City Festival, crying out to potential tourists.
"They don't even know we're here," said Katy Brown, president of the city's convention and visitors bureau.
But a spotlight might shine soon on the Oak Ridge lab and two other largely forgotten Manhattan Project sites as the nation marks the 70th anniversary of the general order that established the world-shaking atomic research and development program.
The Obama administration is supporting bipartisan legislation in Congress that would designate sites in Oak Ridge; Hanford, Wash.; and Los Alamos, N.M., as national parks.
The designations would make possible wider exposure of the aging laboratories, which altered history -- and, some say, darkened it.
The Hanford site produced plutonium. The Oak Ridge site enriched uranium. And workers in Los Alamos used those materials to assemble the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs dropped on Japan, forcing the Japanese surrender and ending the war. About 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki perished.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation called the creation and use of the atomic bomb "the single most significant event of the 20th century'' in advocating the preservation of buildings once scheduled for demolition.
The president of the Japanese American Association of New York is not as nostalgic. Any commemoration of the sites, Gary S. Moriwaki said, should educate visitors "on the devastating effects of the bombs dropped" on Japan.
"One should reflect on the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,' " Moriwaki said. Oppenheimer, a physicist, guided the project at Los Alamos and has been called the father of the atomic bomb.
Today, thousands of scientists work in those labs on unrelated research, developing pioneering technologies used for Mars exploration, chemotherapy, whole-body X-ray scanning at airports, high-speed computers and biotechnology. This work is a legacy of the brilliant scientists who worked at the sites during World War II, Energy Department officials said.
"You can't deny the impact nuclear weapons have had," said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in nuclear policy. Zenko said preserving the Manhattan Project sites makes sense. "It's a part of American history that most people forget."
Manhattan Project
America's race with Nazi Germany to develop the first atomic bomb received its code name, the Manhattan Project, in late 1941. The establishment of the Manhattan Engineering District followed in August 1942.
Also in 1942, the Hanford reservation, along the Columbia River in eastern Washington, was selected to produce plutonium. The Oak Ridge and Los Alamos labs were established in 1943. In all, 125,000 people worked on the project at those sites and in Manhattan, but only about 1,000 knew the exact purpose of the work. About 32,000 people work at the two labs and Hanford now.
The labs and Hanford all have some nuclear-waste contamination, and they are undergoing cleanups involving up to 30,000 workers employed under multibillion-dollar contracts, said David G. Huizenga, senior adviser for environmental management at the Energy Department.
In Washington state, workers have nearly completed cleaning up a 220-square-mile area along the Columbia River, an Energy spokeswoman said. In Tennessee, workers are cleaning more than a third of the 52-square-mile site, focusing on parts of its three main campuses that worked with uranium. In New Mexico, workers are digging up 55-gallon drums, placing them in larger containers with better seals and burying them 21 feet underground.
Huizenga said he is certain that tourists can safely visit any Manhattan Project site. "Tours will steer well clear of contaminated areas. You would have to be directly digging up the waste to be at risk of being exposed by it," he said.
Concerns about waste is one reason the government originally frowned on the idea of preserving buildings at Los Alamos and the other two sites. Among the notable structures are Oak Ridge's mile-long K-25 building, one of the largest in the world during the war. Los Alamos still has the modest house that was once home to Oppenheimer. And there are historic sites that housed reactors and assembly plants, buildings that by the mid-1990s were falling apart.
"They were all to be destroyed," said Cynthia C. Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, which worked to preserve them. "It was just kind of a quick and not very careful thinking of whether these were valuable properties."
That thinking changed in 1997, when a team from the federal Advisory Council for Historic Preservation visited and team members were impressed by what they saw. Later the National Park Service recommended the establishment of parks at the sites that "could expand and enhance . . . public understanding of this nationally significant story in 20th century American history.''
A park designation bill by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is slowly working its way through committee. Companion legislation by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) is awaiting a vote by the full House, possibly next week.
'It's very nostalgic'
As a national park, Oak Ridge could easily top the roughly 1,500 visitors a year who tour the site now, said Brown, of the city visitors bureau. Tours are conducted by the Energy Department five days a week from June to September.
Brown has ridden the tour bus that boards at the nearby American Museum of Science and Energy and passes through the tall laboratory fence. The lab's graphite reactor, she said, is an awesome sight.
"It's really cool. It's very nostalgic," she said.
The tour included an old control room, where a logbook encased in glass recorded the time when the reactor first went critical, about 5 a.m. Nov. 4, 1943.
At the program's peak, 75,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. Sixty cents of every dollar for the project was spent there.
Brown said she wants more Americans to take the tour. She wants to grab some of the tourists who speed by on their way to Dollywood or the Smoky Mountains.
"We're an ideal location to tell this story because people are driving past us all the time," she said. "This would allow us to do more with what we have. Perhaps we could run it year-round."
At Los Alamos National Laboratory,there are no tours currently, a spokeswoman said. Kelly, of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, said she hopes a park designation will open the site to tours that would include garagelike buildings where the bombs were assembled and Oppenheimer's old house, a small cottage where a woman has lived since 1951.
The woman, 93, signed the house over to the Los Alamos Historical Society with the understanding that she could live there as long as she chose, Kelly said.
"When I first met her, she said, 'You must come see the house,' " Kelly recalled. "She said, 'I haven't changed a thing.' "
State urges DOE to choose vitrification for all Hanford waste Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald July 31, 2012 The Department of Energy needs to pick a preferred way to treat all Hanford tank waste before a massive study is released in the next few months, the state Department of Ecology has told DOE headquarters.
DOE has invested eight years and $85 million on the environmental study, but without a conclusion on how all the waste should be treated, the study will be incomplete, the state said in a recent letter. It was sent by Jane Hedges, manager of the Department of Ecology's Nuclear Waste Program, to Tracy Mustin, principal deputy assistant secretary of DOE's Office of Environmental Management.
The Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement is expected to be released by the end of the year, a delay from earlier DOE statements that it might be available this summer.
The comprehensive document will cover topics such as disposal at Hanford of radioactive waste, the end for the Fast Flux Test Facility, retrieval of waste from Hanford's underground tanks and treatment of the tank waste.
But DOE has said it is not ready to pick a method for treating all 56 million gallons of radioactive waste now held in underground tanks. The waste is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation's weapons program.
High-level radioactive waste in the tanks will be glassified at the Hanford vitrification plant under construction. But the plant was never planned to treat all of the low-activity radioactive waste now held in the tanks in a reasonable amount of time.
"The department has decided the agency wants to keep its options for treating a portion of the low-activity waste open at this time," said Geoff Tyree, Hanford spokesman.
But the state believes DOE already committed to vitrifying all of the low-activity waste during negotiations that led to a 2010 settlement agreement in the state's lawsuit filed against DOE, according to an attachment to the letter.
The state would like DOE to add a second Low Activity Waste Facility to the Hanford vitrification plant to give the plant the capacity to vitrify all of the low-activity radioactive tank waste by 2047.
But a 2009 draft of the environmental study to be released this year also considers alternative supplemental treatment technologies such as steam reforming and grouting.
The state does not believe they have been shown to be as protective of the environment as glassified waste after the treated low-activity waste is buried at a Hanford landfill. Vitrified high-level radioactive waste would be sent to a national repository, once planned to be at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
The state agreed between 2003 and 2006 to let DOE consider alternative treatment approaches as long as they performed "as good as glass," the state said. Then DOE was looking for faster and less-expensive alternatives that produced waste forms that performed as well as glass, according to the state.
"This effort examined many different technologies," according to the letter. "However, in the end no viable approaches were identified."
The state also said that several studies have shown no cost advantages to alternative treatment methods, including grouting or steam reforming.
By delaying picking a preferred way to treat all of the tank waste in the upcoming environmental study, DOE could put related legal deadlines in jeopardy, according to the letter.
By choosing "vague language" on treatment in the environmental study, DOE also is bringing into question its previous commitments about when all waste will be removed from leak-prone single shell tanks and "when and if all the tank waste will be treated," the letter from the state said.
DOE is committed to treating all of Hanford's tank waste, Tyree said.
"We plan to select an efficient and cost-effective method for treating the waste that is also protective of human health and the environment," he said.
It can do that while meeting legal deadlines, including for final selection of a technology by April 30, 2015, he said.
DOE officials previously have said that advances have been made in some treatment technologies.
DOE will be responding to the state with additional information, Tyree said.
The Hanford Advisory Board largely has sided with the state, saying in June that it wanted DOE to discontinue work on alternative treatment methods such as steam reforming and instead plan to treat all tank waste at the vitrification plant.
CH2M Hill to lay off 95 at Hanford, and cuts not over yet Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald August 1, 2012 The Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council has been notified that 67 workers it represents will lose their jobs at Hanford as a result of a planned layoff by CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co.
In addition, 28 people responded to a request for volunteers for layoffs, bringing the total job cuts for workers represented by HAMTC to 95.
The layoffs have been expected. CH2M Hill announced in April that it would cut up to 400 union and nonunion positions in two phases. In the first phase, 58 employees were laid off in June.
That leaves up to about 340 layoffs possible in September, when the second phase of the job reduction will occur. The potential 340 layoffs include the 95 workers represented by HAMTC.
The HAMTC layoff notice was for workers at CH2M Hill and subcontractor Materials and Energy Corp. However, laid off workers with more seniority than workers with the same jobs elsewhere at Hanford can claim their jobs in a "bump and roll." That means workers across the nuclear reservation will be affected.
The 67 HAMTC-represented positions targeted for layoffs are spread across 13 specialties, with the largest number being 25 nuclear chemical operators.
CH2M Hill told workers in a bulletin Tuesday that reduction in force notices will go out Sept. 17, and Sept. 27 will be the last day of paid employment.
While layoffs for union workers will be based on lack of seniority, layoffs for nonunion workers will be decided based on evaluation of skills needed and a rating and ranking process.
CH2M Hill said in April that layoffs will include CH2M Hill workers and workers with the 11 subcontractors that have been with CH2M Hill since it took over the central Hanford environmental cleanup contract.
Many workers will be eligible for a severance package that includes one week of pay for every year worked up to 20 years.
CH2M Hill, with Washington State University and WorkSource, plans an open-to-the-public job fair Oct. 11 at a location to be announced.
SRS curation facility helps preserve Cold War legacy Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle July 31, 2012 Savannah River Site's long history as a center for nuclear weapons production has generated its share of artifacts, which now have a permanent home.
"We've tried to collect things that tell all parts of the Savannah River Site story," said Caroline Bradford, the Cold War artifacts curator for a new 27,000-square-foot "curation facility" dedicated Tuesday with tours and a ribbon cutting.
Housed in a renovated 1960s warehouse once set for demolition, the center holds two main collections: Cold War artifacts from 1950-89 and archaeological artifacts that span 12,000 years before the site was created.
The Cold War collection, kept in a climate-controlled room, includes everything from test tubes to time clocks, along with vintage nuclear items that are so secret they cannot be photographed.
A lead-lined "decontamination basin," vials of heavy-water samples, fuel rod processing gear and other items are mixed with everyday items such as phones, desk fans, trash cans and "no trespassing" signs.
One of the more interesting artifacts is known simply as "Robin," short for robotic insect. The six-legged robot, still packed in a NASA crate, dates to about 1983 and was modified for use in nuclear reactors, Bradford said. The other surviving Robin robot is at the Smithsonian Institution.
The archaeological collection, which is still being moved in from storage, will eventually include more than 1,000 boxes of artifacts from explorations and digs over several decades.
The curation facility is not a museum, but rather a place to preserve important items and help the site comply with the National Historic Preservation Act and other laws that require care for historic federal resources.
David Moody, the Department of Energy's site manager, and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions President Dwayne Wilson praised the facility as a symbol of the site's efforts to reuse its assets in pursuit of new missions.
"We tried to tear this building down several times and, fortunately, did not succeed," Moody said.
SRS IDEAS Program Saves Millions, Merits National Recognition The Aiken Leader July 27, 2012 Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC (SRNS) employee suggestion program has been recognized nationally and internationally for exceptional performance and results since it began in 1998 at the Savannah River Site (SRS).
Known as the SRNS "IDEAS" program, this employee suggestion system has been heralded nationally as a Top 10 employee suggestion process. This is not surprising when considering that over the last five years alone, it has created savings and cost avoidances totaling more than $80 million.
The SRNS IDEAS program recently accepted two prestigious awards presented by the nationally recognized Center for Suggestion System Development (CSSD), "The Elite (Top) Ten" and "Outstanding Suggestion Program Manager of the Year" awards.
In a letter to SRNS, CSSD President Thomas Jensen stated, "My heartfelt congratulations on these deserved accomplishments. It is truly an achievement and an honor to be the recipient of these awards."
SRNS, which has over 5,000 employees, has consistently maintained an annual program participation rate of over 11 percent.
"We are fortunate to have an executive team that fully understands and supports a progressive and innovative employee suggestion program," said Brenda Kelly, SRNS IDEAS Program Manager. "They also understand that a reasonable investment towards quality incentives for submitted and implemented suggestions reaps great rewards."
Last year provides a good illustration of this success. According to Kelly, during 2011 SRNS experienced an average savings per suggestion of $141,000, with an implementation rate of 52 percent.
"It's one thing to have a successful suggestion program from a savings and cost avoidance point of view...and improved productivity," said Dwayne Wilson, SRNS President & CEO. "But, we also greatly appreciate the fact that our employees are turning in quality suggestions that have had a significant impact on the effectiveness of our safety program."
According to Kelly, one of the top IDEAS suggestions made during a recent productivity promotion was related to safety.
"Our executive review team rated it as number one, not just because of a major cost avoidance, but more importantly, this suggestion also created a new method to perform a function within a contaminated work area that dramatically reduced the radioactive exposure employees had been experiencing while performing this particular task," said Kelly.
Kelly explained that last year over 600 safety-related suggestions were turned in for consideration. Well over 400 were accepted.
"We have a reputation for safety as evidenced by the thousands of safety-related suggestions submitted since the inception of the IDEAS program at SRS," said Wilson. "That's 'walking the talk,' always looking for a safer way to do business. When our employees see something unsafe, they say something for safety."
SRNS employees are committed to creating safe, innovative, effective solutions for our country's most pressing initiatives. SRNS offers in-depth nuclear knowledge for the nation and works to make the future of our country secure, energy independent and environmentally responsible.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, is a Fluor Partnership comprised of Fluor, Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell, responsible for the management and operations of the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site, including the Savannah River National Laboratory, located near Aiken, South Carolina. |
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