‘2020 Year in Review’ Highlights EM Accomplishments, Cleanup Priorities

WASHINGTON, D.C. – EM has published its 2020 Year in Review, summarizing the accomplishments of cleanup work across the DOE complex over the course of the year, including numerous major program priorities.

The Year in Review highlights achievements at each EM site and at EM headquarters, including:

• Completing the East Tennessee Technology Park Vision 2020 at Oak Ridge, which became the first site in the world to remove an entire uranium enrichment complex.
• Starting operations at the first-of-a-kind Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) — the last major piece of the site’s liquid waste treatment system — with the potential to process as much as 9 million gallons of liquid waste per year.
• Achieving significant advancement of two other key components of DOE’s tank waste treatment mission:
• Increasing progress in construction, startup, and commissioning critical to the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste system at the Hanford Site.
• Continuing modifications at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit, which will turn about 900,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste into a granular solid at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory Site.
• Completing demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which was once the highest-risk building at the Hanford Site.
• Breaking ground on a 2,275-foot deep utility shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a key infrastructure piece to support future operations at the site.
• Resuming cleanup at the Energy Technology Engineering Center after more than a decade, including demolition of a dozen buildings and setting a path to completing demolition of all DOE-owned buildings at the site in 2021.
• Reaching a milestone 11 million tons of mill tailings shipped from a former uranium ore processing site in Moab, Utah, to a disposal cell near Crescent Junction, Utah.
• Completing remediation activities on and around the historic Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, and conveying 70 sites to the DOE Office of Legacy Management (LM) for long-term stewardship — the first EM-to-LM transfer in more than a decade.
• Completing site restoration at the Separations Process Research Unit in New York state and turning the site back to the DOE Office of Naval Reactors.
• Implementing the full Interim Measure for addressing the chromium plume at Los Alamos to hold the spread of chromium contamination within the site boundaries as a final solution is developed and put in place.
• Successfully implementing the Department’s first application of its science-based high-level radioactive waste interpretation through the shipment of a small quantity of waste from SRS for safe off-site treatment and disposal.
• Putting in place the first end-state style contracts at the Hanford and Nevada sites, with several others progressing across the EM complex.

Click here to read EM’s complete 2020 Year in Review report.