NATIONAL CLEANUP WORKSHOP DAY 3: THE FUTURE OF EM
The Third and Final Day of the National Cleanup Workshop brought the event to a close, with numerous panels focused on highlighting the future potential of the EM cleanup program.
The day kicked with a panel moderated by Carlsbad Mayor Pro Tempore, City Councilmember, and ECA Board Member Jason "JJ" Chavez, where speakers discussed the current status of The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and its future trajectory. As of today, WIPP has successfully and safely traveled 17 million loaded miles and received 14,000 shipments at an average pace of 17 shipments a week. Mark Bollinger, Manager at the DOE-EM Carlsbad Field Office, showcased how WIPP has successfully renewed its permit and has made the necessary plans to continue to ship and isolate waste at the speed of safety. In the next few years, WIPP will mine a new underground panel, repair aging infrastructure, and receive the first waste shipments from the Hanford site, among other projects that are focused on increasing transparency and bolstering its communications.
Dr. Ines Triay, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) at Florida International University (FUI), commented on how WIPP is considering the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and robotics in waste management activities to increase worker safety and decrease the cost of expensive operations.
Every speaker emphasized the importance of local community support to WIPP. Community support and passion was vital to allow WIPP to operate in New Mexico, it has been crucial to ensure WIPP’s continuous and consistent funding, and it will be required to secure WIPP’s future. WIPP relies on the partnership with their local partners in the Carlsbad community and the State of New Mexico to keep the cleanup mission running.
WIPP is still a pilot plan, as there is no other institution in the world that has undertaken the mission WIPP has for 25 years. We are still learning what operations will be necessary and what challenges must be surmounted in the second half of WIPP’s life cycle – WIPP is not done, nor is it stagnant. In fact, WIPP is not projected to reach maximum capacity until 2080. However, WIPP operators are still taking the next steps to plan for another repository and have begun an initiative to send reports to DOE and stakeholders to facilitate the development of a future repository. Community engagement and support was crucial to site, construct, and to keep WIPP operating even today. That support will be critical to siting a future repository and ensuring the longevity of the cleanup mission. As Dr. Triay said, WIPP is a preparatory step – and ECA, working alongside the DOE communities, is the exact organization to move this initiative forward.
The following panel focused on the EM Program directly, through a discussion on what DOE-EM needs to do in order to secure the future success of the program.
Speakers noted the opportunity to maximize progress while leadership who are champions of the cleanup program are in office, such as Congressman Chuck Fleischmann (TN-R). Partners in Congress are crucial to keeping cleanup sites, communities, and DOE continuously and consistently well-funded. To keep funding flowing well into the future, DOE-EM needs to consider how it will continue to make a business case for the cleanup program that Congress can buy into, whether it be through messaging that emphasizes the liability of the cleanup work, setting the stage for clean energy, cleaning up the environment, or by highlighting program successes such as, Rocky Flats in Colorado and Fernald in Ohio. Cleanup is a bipartisan, cross agency and office effort and the leaders and officials need to be on the same page about the cleanup program.
Seth Kirshenberg, ECA Executive Director, focused on the potential benefits of outreach to congressional staffers, in order to educate them about the program and connect them with communities. Educating future leaders and tying them to the communities is crucial to ensuring that the Congress of the future still has the cleanup champions of today.
Speakers also touched on how contracting can be used to drive the EM mission forward. They suggested a breadth of ideas, such as utilizing more long-term contracts, reconsidering the end-state in end-state contracts, and accounting for the entire complex when contracting. Speakers also discussed the need to equip workers at each site with a wide variety of skills across the mission, in order to create leaders who are knowledgeable about all aspects of the program.
Keeping communities central to the cleanup mission and increasing community engagement was another topic discussed. Legacy is important to ensuring the cleanup program can continue its mission, and the best way to invest in legacy is to invest in our communities.
Later in the day, attendees discussed how nuclear "waste" from cleanup sites can reused to benefit communities and the current cleanup complex. DOE-EM wants to flip the paradigm of nuclear waste – not as presenting a cleanup challenge but as offering a reuse opportunity to fulfill a national need. Community Reuse Organizations (CROs) already have experience reusing DOE-EM materials and land to drive economic development. How can we expand on this concept to a national scale?
For private companies like Oklo and Zeno Power, spent fuel and nuclear waste are potential fuel sources to power advanced fast reactors and microreactors. Advanced fast reactors have few fuel options available, and recycled fuel offers a reliable source of power generation. Nuclear waste could be used for purposes aside from energy generation as well. Radioactive materials from DOE-EM and legacy sites contain unique isotopes that could be used to fight viruses, diseases, and cancers through nuclear medicine.
Panelists emphasized that none of these opportunities would be available without a firm public-private partnership between industry, government, and the communities where waste is stored, such as Oklo's cooperation with Idaho National Laboratory and Zeno Power's partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They credited ECA with helping them to understand the importance of community engagement, and how to conduct it. Legacy communities are such a draw for private industry because of the talent, passion, and knowledge these communities have for the cleanup complex. Communities stand to benefit from these partnerships too, as private industry can help to reduce risk and taxpayer burden by finding a use for radioactive materials and taking these materials out of communities. Material reuse fulfills national security needs as well. In light of the Russian ban on uranium imports, reuse of U.S. radioactive materials presents a secure power-source for our nation. The key to success for any of these projects, however, lies with engaging federal, state, and local officials, and communicating and cooperating across all levels.
This year's cleanup workshop also included a session discussing AI, where speakers commented on how they are implementing AI into the cleanup program to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and increase worker safety. Use cases include taking inventory in nuclear reactors, determining risks, predicting worker safety concerns, increasing the efficiency of monitoring industrial hygiene, projecting future production scenarios, and upholding environmental protection. Speakers emphasized that AI should be integrated naturally as workers are onboarded, and that AI should be demonstrated as a tool to aid them in their job, not something that will take their job.
Review the agenda and speakers from the past two days below:
Later this evening, ECA will meet with Representative Fleischmann and others at the Nuclear Cleanup Caucus to discuss nuclear workforce and trades development in EM.
ECA is proud to bring another Cleanup Workshop to a close. We look forward to what developments, initiatives and growth will come from discussions held at the Workshop, and we are grateful for the partnership that we have forged with EFCOG and DOE-EM to enable 10 years of progress.
Hosted by ECA with the cooperation of the Energy Facility Contractors Group and DOE-EM, the workshop brings together more than 800 senior DOE executives, officials from DOE sites, industry leaders, local elected officials, contractors and community stakeholders to discuss EM’s progress to address the environmental legacy of the Manhattan Project and Cold War-era U.S. nuclear weapons program.