"Can we hang on?" Reflections on the ICP CAB, 2014-2021

??“Think about the old days

What we've been through to survive
Do we get better with time?

Tell me I'm wrong”??

 
These are song lyrics from the Cold War Kids’ song, “Can we hang on,” a ballad about lovers who are fighting to stay together amidst the reality of love’s inevitable difficulties. You’re thinking, “maybe there’s a Cold War connection, but what on earth might that have to do with nuclear cleanup?” Well, can you hang on?
 
Seven years ago, I walked into my first CAB meeting. I was a fresh-faced rookie in a room of grizzled veterans. They were speaking a language that was predominated by acronyms. For a solid hour I thought one presenter kept referring to a “circler” or “circular” in some kind of strange Boston accent until I leaned over to my seatmate who clarified that he was saying “CERCLA” - as in “The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.” ...Duh...
 
What few words weren’t abbreviations for regulatory documents, processes, and facilities, were isotopes or elements on the periodic table that only ever occupied my mind in the 12 hours between a study-session cram and the Friday morning test in my high-school chemistry class. “Strontium, iridium, iritium… yum-yum, isn’t it time to eat?”
 
Managing to interpret the details through this fog of letters and chem-lingo, my already wide-eyes widened when I realized the scope of the process - a massive nuclear cleanup effort - that had been going on in the Idaho desert since the time of my aforementioned chemistry class, and, importantly, what had still to be achieved in the future. I reasoned that in the six years I would serve on the CAB, much of that enormous task would be likely to take place under my watch. I would see the last barrel ship off, the last of the 900,000 gallons processed, maybe even some substantial D&D.
 
I dove into seeking to better understand the task at hand by highlighting the hell out of my list of acronyms, reading “Proving the Principle,” and watching YouTube videos on radioactive exposure. That last one was great for educational purposes but led to some elevated blood pressure when it came time to do the tours at the facilities.
 
Shortly after I started, the incident at WIPP meant that TRU waste shipments from  AMWTP and RWMC would be suspended. See how quickly I was learning? Not just getting a handle on acronyms, but also coming to grips with the fact that nuclear cleanup, like love, has its own inevitable difficulties.
 
Underlining that last lesson were the next few years of meetings during which the updates on IWTU exhausted the thesaurus of synonyms for “to delay.” It turns out that pioneering a process to treat sodium-bearing liquid waste hasn’t exactly been easy. Even so, we have gotten better with time and here we are, hopefully on the brink of “hot operations” after years of refining the process and an alphabet soup of outages. In so many other ways we have made substantial progress despite occasional setbacks.
 
I’ve helped celebrate the retirement for many of those grizzled veterans that were in the room on my first day and we’ve even managed to retire some of the acronyms. AMWTP - despite my impassioned pleas that it be repurposed and keep working - went the way of Bob Pence - a cowboy hat and a sunset. Some of the ARPs that I toured early on were deactivated and decommissioned about the same time that Brad Bugger deactivated his dosimeter.
 
In these years I will have seen three different contractors, made dozens of friends, learned more about hydrology than I ever wanted to, and enhanced my vocabulary with great words like “vitrification,” “in-situ bioremediation,” and “vapor exhumation.”
 
So now as I reflect on the past and look forward to my final meeting as a member of the CAB and all that still lies ahead, the question in the title refrain from the Cold War Kids’ song plays in my ears, “Can we hang on?” and the lyrics follow, “You can find it. If you’re dying to live. If you want to know the secret, hang on.”
 
My CAB journey hasn’t been precisely what I anticipated but, then, neither is life.  Achievements and struggles are everything in the moment but nothing in the past.  What remains afterwards are the experiences and the people - the relationships. I understand the importance of our task - the obligations of the settlement agreement and the regulatory requirements for disposal are all very real and urgent and I do believe that we can and will ultimately achieve them - if we hang on - but as we do, let’s not lose sight of who we are doing it all for - for me and for you.